


Ghosts of the Faceless

by madamepens (inkers)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Feels, Recovery, Romance, Slight Canon Divergence, Slow Burn, anxiety mention, on the run/in hiding, pre-Civil War tensions, some language, typical mcu violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:30:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6254818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkers/pseuds/madamepens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An ex-agent joins the frenzied pursuit to protect her former patient, hoping against hope she can help him remember his past before even he loses himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fiery Ones

The agent left Sera standing in the corner of the office with her hands cuffed behind her while he sat back at his desk and radioed his higher-ups on the com system. It was a language she didn’t understand at all and one she knew she should have attempted to pick up at some point in her life, but by now of course it was too late. She wondered how she’d made it so far into this mess without it.

At the very least she could see her way out of the office – the problem would lie mostly in getting out of the building. As soon as the agent’s back was turned she dropped silently into a crouch and rocked back into a sitting position to pass the chain of the handcuffs underneath her feet to her front. In one motion she stood and passed the chain over the man’s head, pulling back against his neck and feeling the cuffs bite into her wrists. When he was out she searched him for the keys to the cuffs, listening intently for noises outside the office door, and then released herself from the cuffs when she found them in his jacket pocket. She took his gun, frowning to herself that she’d lost her good knives, but began her slow exit after seeing nothing else on the agent or around the office that she could use.

She could hear more Russian around the corner at the end of the hall and snuck around the opposite direction, searching intently for the easiest way out. Just from the dilapidated looks of the place, this wasn’t a permanent location for them – she wondered absently if they’d really set up shop in Italy just to look for her, or if they were following the same leads she was. At this point it was impossible to tell who was looking for who when everyone was looking for everyone else for so many different reasons.

There was a broken exit sign around the next corner and she refrained from sighing in relief, feeling a presence nearby deep in her gut. More than likely they’d stationed a guard or two outside the door, so she pressed her ear to the crack between the door and its frame and sure enough heard whispers, this time it would seem in Italian. She’d have to take them both out to make it, and there’d be no doing it quietly when her best (and only) weapon was the pistol in her right hand. She prepared herself mentally for sprinting.

After a deep breath, she wrenched open the door and shot, once – twice – three times before the two guards were on the ground, and she shut the door behind her before she started running down the stairs into the alleyway. As soon as she rounded the corner at the end she heard the door slam open far behind her, heard the quick, hard footfalls of her faceless pursuers. She recognized now the older part of the Aurora district and started heading south towards the river – the timing was just perfect enough she could take the bus to Porta Susa, and take the Metro from there to anywhere else. She needed time to sniff out a new lead regardless, so now it was only a matter of losing her pursuers.

She leapt into another alleyway through the crowd on the side of the street, losing the sounds of her pursuers amongst all the people, but she kept her ears tuned to Russian shouting. As she snaked her way through the district towards the bus station she soon enough heard no shouting at all, only the milling Italian voices of the people she ran through on the streets. She made it on the 2:55 bus just before the doors began to close, shoving a handful of bills towards the driver as she took a seat in the middle of the bus next to a dark-haired man in a three-piece suit.

As she caught her breath as quietly as she could, she began looking around the bus, double checking that no one seemed too suspicious. Her instincts told her she was safe however, and she counted herself lucky to have escaped her captors with only two bruised ribs and dislocated-and-reset shoulder, as well as the loss of her good knives but not the loss of her wallet, passport, or phone, which had all stayed untouched in her front jeans pockets. If she ran into them again, she wouldn’t find herself so lucky, she knew. She pulled the hood of her jacket up almost on automatic, wishing she hadn’t lost her sunglasses in the initial struggle with the Russians.

She glanced over at the newspaper in the suit’s hands to her right. The headline read “ _Avengers negano associazione con Triskelion colpevole,_ ” accompanied by a picture of Tony Stark. She’d learned relatively little Italian during her few months in the country, but she’d picked up enough to catch the gist of the article: governmental pressure on the Avengers to find the rest of the culprits behind the downfall of SHIELD – namely (though never named) the Winter Soldier. If news about their struggles were going global, she knew there had to be more behind that governmental pressure than the media was letting on, mostly because the information surrounding the “culprit” was so jumbled and hard to pinpoint. She should know.

It had been two years already since the fall of the Triskelion, and even knowing what little she did about the related events, it was difficult to imagine how much the consequences of the fall followed them all even now. She wondered idly if even the Russians that had found her were leftover HYDRA agents – it was possible they could just be KGB agents keeping her out of their way, but both possibilities were equally likely, and ultimately she had no idea. It almost felt like she’d been running so long that she no longer knew who she was really running from.

She got off at the next stop, briskly walking the short blocks from the stop to Porta Susa, heading down to the lower level to board the next soonest Metro. She’d have to just find lodging wherever it happened to take her. After boarding the second to last car, she turned her phone back on and hoped her private network was still functional enough to reach a contact even in the subway.

_Seems my luck has run out_ , she thought melancholically when the text wouldn’t go through. She’d have to risk finding lodging on her own, and pray she wasn’t the Russians’ top priority – she was willing to bet they had a much bigger target in Torino, and she could only hope they didn’t find him before she did.

There was a sharp, sudden pain in her foot and she jolted half out of her seat. A large black boot moved quickly away from her victimized appendage, and she followed the line from it to its owner, a tall, overly-fit man in a red henley and black jacket.

“ _Scusatemi_ ,” the man muttered as he moved quickly past her, taking extra care not to step on her toes again, before he opened the door to the next car and closed it swiftly behind him.

Sera frowned and rubbed idly at her foot, staring after him in slight confusion over why his apology bothered her so much. She knew enough Italian to recognize the overly formal form of it, but something about the way he’d said it kept her staring after him for another second. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him, but regardless she figured she was just on edge from outrunning her pursuers. Now she only felt annoyed that the man had pulled her from her thoughts.

Her mind returned to her target as she continued to idly rub at her sore foot, but the longer she followed that train of thought, the more distracted she felt by the pain. Not that the pain was any worse than her ribs or her shoulder, but it was just annoying, nagging at her thoughts as if the man who’d stepped on her had personally offended her.

His voice replayed in her head and she realized what was bothering her – his accent hadn’t been Italian. She frowned, and against her better judgment stood up to follow the feeling in her gut. He’d had an American accent that he’d seemed too distracted to try to hide, and suddenly the sheer size of him was leaving a weird feeling in her gut. She went into the car he’d disappeared into and looked around, but no one in the car had that red shirt and black jacket. No one even matched his size. Her frowned deepened.

The man had walked into the last car on the Metro – and just disappeared.


	2. What Worse Luck

Three hotels and five days later, once her injuries were mostly healed and she’d gotten another lead from a newer contact, Sera headed back into Torino on the Metro. Her target had been spotted (possibly – the image was of course too blurry to know for sure) on a traffic cam downtown only yesterday. She only had a general idea of where to look, but at the very least she could extrapolate the kinds of places he might go just based on the kinds of places she would. They were, after all, both on the run.

A red pullover flashed across her vision and her head snapped up – to find a young woman taking the seat across from her with a copy of _No Country for Old Men_ in her hands. Sera sighed at herself. The man on the Metro from a week ago had had her on edge ever since, even though she knew how incredibly unlikely it was that he was who she had been looking for all this time. All the same, the mere fact that he had disappeared in such a closed space made her nervous.

When the woman across from her shifted uncomfortably Sera realized she’d been staring at her, and she promptly returned her gaze to her lap. One more stop and she could set to work. She had an idea already of where to look, knowing her target must have found a spot to lay low since his last supposed sighting.

She only hoped he’d be more welcoming than everyone warned her he’d be.

The second the doors opened at the next station, Sera pulled her hood up and set off at a brisk pace up to the surface and onto the streets of downtown Torino. She felt her phone vibrate once she’d reached the older, more run-down part of the area and she put it to her ear.

“Agent,” spoke the male voice on the other end. Thus far they had operated without names, leaning for a more cautious sort of interaction just in case. “You’re not his only pursuer today.”

“What do you mean?” she muttered, glancing back at the crowd crossing the street behind her.

“I don’t know who they are,” he said quickly, “but today may not be the best day to go after him.”

“If someone else is on our lead then I can’t afford to wait,” she said. There was an abandoned building ahead of her that looked promising, and she began searching for a way in. “I have to find him first. Anyone else reaches him before me, we could be in trouble.”

“Agent, if you’re caught this time…”

“I know,” she said with a grunt, kicking open the back door to the building with a loud metallic ringing. It looked like it had once been a small factory. “You’re out. Either way I’ll get what I promised you and we’ll be even.”

“That’ll be an awfully hard promise to keep if you’re dead.” The line went dead, and she stuffed the phone back into her front pocket.

There had been a bent piece of rebar holding the door shut that she’d jostled loose when she kicked it open. The building was three stories tall, and this first floor seemed to have been where an assembly line took place – there were dilapidated pieces of equipment strewn about the floor and long conveyer belts set in rows. More than likely the next two floors up were offices or storage rooms, and even more likely whoever had blocked the door was hiding up there – if they hadn’t run off at the sound of the rebar crashing to the floor.

She looked around for more signs of life as she walked quietly towards the staircase at the other end of the room, dodging between columns and machinery and suddenly regretting not entering more stealthily. She hadn’t really thought that the first place she checked would be so promising – but of course the rebar blocking the door didn’t necessarily mean it was her target hiding out here, as truly it could have been any poor soul looking for free shelter. It was only the clean, effortless way it had been bent that gave her any sort of idea that she was on the right track.

The stairs at least seemed to be in better condition than the assembly floor, and she made her way up to the next floor as quietly as she could, trying hard not to jostle any of the various debris that had accumulated there. The early morning light shined through the singular window and lit up the dust floating through the air ahead of her, and she frowned slightly at how much there was for a supposedly abandoned building. Someone had definitely been there, and recently, too. She watched as more dust entered the stream of light when she passed closer, then turned with the second half of the staircase and stared ahead of her at the closed door opposite the window.

She could make out footprints in the dust on the steps in her line of vision: fresh, but numerous enough that she couldn’t make much more out of them. On instinct she pulled the gun out of her back pocket and held it out at her side, ready to aim should she need it. With a deep breath at the top of the stairs, she put her hand on the door handle and pushed slowly, wincing when the hinges creaked loudly through the empty space.

As soon as her foot made contact over the threshold, there was a hand over her mouth and a strong arm pinning her arms to her torso, pulling her the rest of the way into the hallway and lifting her off the ground when she began to struggle. She grunted, her airways blocked by the massive hand over the lower half of her face, and kicked back at the large man holding her prone. Her boot made contact with his shin but he seemed to barely register any pain as he carried her kicking and screaming into an office to the left of the door to the stairwell, and finally his hand moved lower to let her breathe through her nose.

“I’m going to take my hand away,” the man said at her right ear, clearly American, “and you’re going to tell me who you’re working for.”

She shook her head as best she could in his grip. There was no way in hell she was going to tell this stranger anything. He seemed to gather that much from her uncooperative struggling but removed his hand anyways, letting it fall to grip her shoulder. “Get off of me,” she grunted, throwing her torso against his arms as much as she was able – he was impossibly stronger than her.

“Answer me, please,” he said, his tone just as commanding despite the nicety attached.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” she hissed. “Let go of me.”

“I let go of you and you’re just going to run away,” he said, and took her lack of response as a confirmation. “Look, I’m willing to bet you’re after what I’m after, and I’m willing to bet too that we can help each other if you’ll just cooperate with me.”

“What makes you think I’d ever do that?” she spat, her voice higher pitched than she’d intended. She could feel the anxiety rising in her gut from the prolonged feeling of restraint, the claustrophobic nature of not being able to move one’s arms. “What makes you think I wouldn’t kill you as soon as I agreed and you let me go? I’m not interested in negotiating with someone like you—“

“You’ve had a loaded gun in your hand this whole time and haven’t once moved to use it against me,” he said, and her struggling lessened. “I think you’re just as much a pacifist as I am. Now are you going to talk to me, or am I going to carry you to the nearest police station to report you for trespassing on private property?”

She glared at the peeling grey wall in front of her and stopped struggling altogether. Whoever this man was, he obviously wasn’t looking for a fight, but she couldn’t figure out for the life of her how he could be so trusting of a stranger with a gun not to shoot him as soon as he let her go, regardless of what he deduced from her disuse of it thus far. At the very least she agreed with him that it was possible they shared the same goals being in this abandoned factory. Ultimately she nodded her consent, and the man released her.

As soon as her feet touched the floor, she spun around and backed up to the opposite end of the room, pointing her pistol at her attacker before she even gave herself a chance to take him in.

The man she made out in front of her was the very last she’d expected to see.

He was dressed in just jeans and a dirty grey t-shirt, but she’d recognize that strong-jawed face anywhere. Standing a good four inches taller and plenty wider than her, Captain America made for an imposing figure next to the doorway even in street clothes. It took nearly all her concentration not to stare at him slack-jawed in shock, but to instead keep her expression as steady as possible. There was no telling whether he’d prove himself friend or foe to her, and she wasn’t sure how much he’d know.

“You sure are a long way from the States, Captain,” she muttered, and watched in near-awe as he put his hands up in a peaceful, placating gesture, though his eyes were hard-set against hers.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he explained.

“I expected as much,” she replied. She kept the gun trained on him as much as her instincts told her to point it away. Of course she had no intention of shooting Captain America, but she likewise had no intention of letting him get in her way, no matter how much she respected him. “And this is where you tracked him to?”

He leveled his gaze with hers. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he said, his arms falling slowly to his sides even with the gun still trained on him. “Who are you working for?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” she muttered.

“And yet we both find ourselves in the same abandoned building in the middle of an Italian city following, I would assume, a similar if not the exact same lead, right?” he said. “If we’re looking for the same person, I need to know why.”

Sera regarded him for a second. As much as she knew they were on the same side, she still couldn’t risk letting him reach her target before she did. There was too much riding on her reaching him to let even the First Avenger get in the way of that – yet all the same, she wanted to trust him. It couldn’t hurt to have him on her side, especially when she was on the run from so many of the same shared enemies. “…I work for no one but myself,” she offered in response. As of two years ago, that statement was true enough for her purposes.

“Just you?” he tested. “Not HYDRA? Not even the KGB?”

“You really think I wouldn’t have shot you by now if I were operating on any of their orders?” she retorted.

“Then why are you after Bucky?”

She stared at him, considering him for a hard moment before she decided to trust what her instincts were telling her. She lowered the gun, the safety still on, and stuffed it back into the rear pocket of her black jeans. If there was any hope of her reaching him, before Steve Rogers did or not, she’d have to trust this man. Her gut was telling her he had a way stronger lead than any of her contacts possibly could. Accepting that, it was only a matter of convincing him of her intentions.

Steve crossed his arms and relaxed his soldier’s posture, regarding her cautiously but with a sense of integrity that she hadn’t seen in a man in a long time.

“…You and I both know the danger he’s in,” she said hesitantly. “Everyone is looking for him, and if he falls into the wrong hands again—“

“But why are you looking for him?” he repeated. “Who are you?”

Before she even had a chance to open her mouth, the door to the decrepit office slammed open and they both turned to the tall dark skinned man that entered, half out of breath and looking between the two of them more frantically than he was confused.

“We have to go,” said Sam Wilson. Sera only barely recognized him from the events at the Triskelion but there was no surprise in finding him with Steve Rogers. “Looks like the Russians tracked him to the same spot we did, and now he’s on the run again.”

Steve nodded gravely and began to follow Sam out the door, before they both turned to Sera when she moved in tandem with them.

She looked between the two Avengers. “I can help,” she said. “There’s no time to waste on deciding.”

There was no doubt the Captain agreed with her last statement, but she could recognize that he really had no other reason to trust her besides the fact that she seemed a decent enough person not to put a bullet in him. She watched the tension rise in his body the longer they stood there.

“My only intention is to help him,” she said quickly. “There’s not really any time to explain, but I promise you can trust me. And I have no doubt Falcon will take me out if I go back on that promise.”

Sam smirked slightly as Steve nodded his consent, then jerked his head in the direction of the hallway. “I hope you’re a fast runner.”


	3. Disclosed

Even Sera herself was surprised that she was able to keep up with the two ex-soldiers, though she had a feeling the Captain was working hard to match his companion’s naturally slower speed so they wouldn’t get separated. She followed them out of the abandoned factory and into an intricate system of alleyways, her ears perked to the distant sounds of footfalls that didn’t match the three of theirs. Soon enough she could make out strings of frantic Russian and she had to wonder what had them so persistent.

Just as before, it seemed the longer they ran, the more distant the sounds of their pursuers became, and she hoped her new companions had some idea of where they were going. Her hood had long flown off from their speed and idly she wished she’d tied her hair back.

Almost as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she felt a sharp tug at her long blond hair and she cried out as she fell flat on her back with a hard smack against the pavement. A burly, crooked looking man was standing above her, a few blond strands of her hair falling from his fist as he began to kneel beside her and pull something out of his back pocket. She rolled to the side and used the momentum to swing a leg out at his head, but he caught it effortlessly and used it to pull her back towards him, his other hand brandishing a deadly-looking Russian ballistic knife.

In a near-panic she twisted and kicked at the hand holding the knife with her other leg, which successfully got him to let go of her but not of the ballistic knife. With a split-second decision she forwent reaching for her gun and instead kicked at his torso with both legs while he was still reeling and sent him flying onto his back.

She made it to her feet quickly and went to kick the knife out of his hands so she could get away safely, but suddenly a massive weight tackled her to the ground. Before she even had a chance to react the weight was gone, and through the ringing in her ears from her head smacking against the pavement a second time she heard the tell-tale sounds of a fist fight. She raised herself up onto her elbows in time to see Steve Rogers knocking her new attacker flat on his back and to catch the glint out of the corner of her eye in the direction of her first attacker.

She made to get to her feet in order to leap in the path of his ballistic knife but the third member of their party had already kicked him in the head by the time she was sitting up, knocking him out cold. Their initial pursuers seemed to have caught up to them as Steve and Sam both turned to the sound of footsteps behind her, and on instinct she leapt to her feet and spun to face them as well.

The Russians rounded the corner not a second later and she caught the glint of two more ballistic knives amongst the five of them, and as she wasn’t sure her companions knew the danger such Russian-issued weapons posed, she targeted the two of them first. Her fist connected almost immediately with the jaw of the first man, sending him crashing into the wall, and she turned to the other knife-wielder while Steve and Sam took out the other three attackers, who she noted had started to pull out revolvers. Her fist landed the blow but only into the man’s palm, and she ducked as he swung his knife at her. From her lower position she aimed an elbow at the man’s groin, and when it connected she hit the knife out of his hand with the heel of her palm followed by a close-fisted blow to the side of his head.

The second he went down she felt a sharp, piercing pain in her left arm, and with a loud curse she pulled the ballistic knife out of her upper arm before throwing it back at the man who’d shot it at her, nailing him square in the throat before he’d even had a chance to push himself from the wall he’d crashed into. Her hand went to stifle the bleeding in her arm as she turned back to see the three other attackers on the ground around Steve’s and Sam’s feet.

“Think there are more coming?” she asked breathily, the sound of her own voice making her head throb where she’d hit it.

“Definitely,” Sam said just as breathily, and started to run again. “Come on!”

She winced as she followed him, ignoring the look Steve shot her as she tightened the grip on her arm. Without being able to swing her arms, it was a lot harder to keep up with them, but she kept her legs going by sheer force of will, using the focus on speeding up to distract herself from the throbbing in her arm and head. Surely they were heading to some sort of safe house where she could patch herself up.

After six more blocks of running, now well away from downtown Torino, the two Avengers began to slow and she resisted the urge to ask them where they were headed. One more block and they found themselves in another alleyway, behind what looked to be another abandoned building – granted, it seemed only fitting as the city was so full of them. Sam opened the padlock on the door, which she noted was much newer than the door itself, meaning they’d probably padlocked the place themselves. She followed them inside, too exhausted to even consider feeling apprehensive.

They obviously hadn’t been using the space for too long, but there were a couple laptops set up on a table next to a makeshift router and a few pieces of electronic equipment she didn’t recognize, and in the corner closest to the door two cots had been set up with blankets and no pillows. All the windows had been boarded up, so the only light they had was what little made it in between the boards. She leaned herself up against the wall next the door after she’d closed it behind them, attempting rather unsuccessfully to catch her breath.

Sam exhaled in a huff and booted up the two laptops. “I don’t know how they caught onto our lead,” he said, more to Steve of course than to her, “but from what I could tell they’d also found a better one heading north out of the country.”

“Then how’d they find us?” Steve replied, his voice ridiculously steady for someone who’d just sprinted across a city.

“Probably caught on to all our snooping,” Sam said, shaking his head at the computer screen.

Steve turned to Sera then, his eyes drawn to the blood seeping through her fingers. He held a hand out to her as if to usher her forward. “Come on, we need to get you sutured up,” he said. “I’ve got a first aid kit in my bag.”

She regarded him hesitantly, surprised that he was concerned at all about her wound given his lack of trust in her. At most she’d only expected him to hand her a suture kit to do it herself, which she would have been perfectly fine with.

He took a step towards her, hand still outstretched to guide her towards his bag by the cots, his face easing into a more understanding expression. Sera swallowed and pushed off the wall, walking forward until his hand met her back between her shoulder blades, and he used it to guide her onto one of the cots before he dug in his bag for the first aid kit. He handed her a piece of gauze and helped her gingerly remove her leather jacket so she could press the gauze to the wound to quell the bleeding while he prepped the rest of the materials.

“Looks like we’re headed to Germany,” Sam said from behind the laptops, the sound of keys clacking underneath his fingertips in the background. “Let’s just hope our buddies back there lose him wherever he ends up.”

“Any idea where that’ll be?” Steve said over his shoulder as he pulled the gauze from her arm, seeing that the bleeding had stopped enough. He uncapped a water bottle and poured it gently over the wound as she tried not to wince, knowing the next steps in the process would only sting more.

“We’re not gonna know ‘til he gets there,” Sam replied, then sighed at the screen. “I’m not sure we were even close today. Seems to me like he caught on pretty quick to who was on his tail and got the hell out of dodge.”

She did wince when he began cleaning the wound with a mild soap, though she applauded him silently for knowing better than to use hydrogen peroxide. Once the wound was clean and the dried blood was gone, he rinsed it again with water and got out the suture kit. “I don’t think we can afford to wait for him to move though,” Steve said, brow furrowing. Watching his facial expressions was a good distraction from the pain once he began sewing, she discovered quickly, and she wondered at the fact that she’d likely never seen an American hero so up close before. The thought made her frown. Did it count if…? “We should start heading that way before sundown.”

Sam looked up from the laptops. “We might want to lie low, Cap,” he said. “I don’t like how fast those Russians found us.”

Steve tied up the stitching and packed the suture away with a frown. “They’ll prioritize following him,” he argued. “They only went after us because we followed the same lead to a narrow area, but I don’t think they have a way to track us here. We need to reach him before they do.”

Sam stood up straight and scratched the back of his head. “Better get packed up quick, then.”

Steve nodded absent-mindedly as he refocused on wrapping her arm in a thin bandage. She rested her head up against the wall to make herself stop staring at him, though he seemed to have noticed her attention anyways.

“Thank you,” she muttered as he finished, before he had a chance to comment on her staring. She met his eyes without moving her head from the cool wall – the solidity helped ease her headache.

He watched her for a moment, his hands finally still and propped against his knee away from her arm. “I think we’re even,” he replied.

She shook her head and winced when it throbbed again from the movement. “No,” she said. “You could have left me back there. I assumed you had. But you both came back and saved me from a bad spot, not to mention this—” she gestured to the bandage around her arm, “—so thank you.”

He nodded, and moved back to sit on the other cot as Sam packed up their equipment behind him. “If we’re going to be really even, then, I’m still waiting on a couple answers,” he said, propping his arm up against his raised knee, his expression sober.

She sighed. “I told you my only intention is to help J-… Bucky,” she said slowly. “He’s unstable and has been since he escaped. I can help.”

His brow furrowed slightly. “But who are you?”

She moved her head off of the wall with another wince, taking a deep breath to steady herself. She still wasn’t sure how much she could trust him, no matter his good intentions; she’d been in hiding for too long to trust anyone with information about her, and if he happened to not like what she told him, she wouldn’t even be able to count on him and Sam Wilson for protection. Her full name alone could put herself in jeopardy if they decided to look up her information.

She could tell by his expression that she’d hesitated a bit too long.

“My name is Sarah Brandt,” Sera told him, settling for her alias and hoping they didn’t find the discrepancy until she was long out of their hair. “I’ve been on the run from the same people Bucky Barnes has been for two years now.”

“And who exactly are the people after you?” he asked. Sam had paused in packing over by the table and was listening intently.

“You don’t already know?” she asked, raising a brow at them both.

“We have a good idea,” he replied, “but you might know more than we do what we’re up against at this point.”

She didn’t doubt that he’d picked up on how savvy she was in dealing with what they had that day, but again she wasn’t sure how much information was too much, too telling. “Namely ex-HYDRA agents,” she began, “for obvious reasons. But the Russians we met are at the very least a distant branch of HYDRA, if not completely detached from them. Likely KGB – same people your friend Romanov used to be associated with.”

He frowned. “Why would that particular group be interested in Bucky? Or you, for that matter?”

She suppressed a smirk. “It only makes sense, doesn’t it? I assume you’ve both read the file HYDRA had on him,” she said. “He’s the very inspiration for the Red Room that formed the Black Widow, before HYDRA decided they wanted him for themselves. Now that he’s freed from them, the Russians are taking advantage.”

“That doesn’t explain why they’d be after you, though,” Sam interjected.

“I…” She swallowed and moved her gaze to her hands. There really was no way to explain her involvement with half-truths – not if she wanted these two men to trust her, to believe that she really did just want to help. “I was the Winter Soldier’s physician for several years before SHIELD fell,” she explained slowly, glancing back up at the super soldier across from her.

It didn’t take more than a second for him to connect the dots, and he narrowed his eyes at her in suspicion. The information was damning, yet her behavior didn’t add up, and she watched the thoughts play out on his face.

She continued before he could make any more conclusions. “I joined SHIELD nine years ago after I graduated,” she explained, “and a few years into my employment Pierce assigned me to a special ops group as an agent physician – more as a psychologist, really, but they had me doing fieldwork as well. I wasn’t let in on the real operation behind the group until about a year later, once I’d proved myself trustworthy. It didn’t take long after that to figure out I wasn’t really working for SHIELD – that HYDRA had infiltrated them. The moment I saw…” She took a deep breath. “…The moment I saw the Winter Soldier in the cryotube, I knew I’d been dropped in the deep end.”

“What you’re telling us,” Sam said, low, “is that you worked for HYDRA. Through all the shit that happened to us two years ago.”

Steve’s gaze was steady, and it unnerved her more than his anger would have. “Not through all of it,” she replied. “I got myself caught after Fury… after his assassination.”

“Caught by SHIELD?” Steve asked, monotone.

She shook her head slowly. “By HYDRA,” she explained, and at the looks on their faces decided to continue further into the ditch she was digging for herself. “I hated what I was seeing in that special ops group from the start. When I saw the cryotube, what they were doing to this man… and what I dug up about him from the old Red Room files… there was no doubt in my mind I’d been thrust into HYDRA, nor any doubt that I had to do something.” She tucked her arm closer to her body and leaned forward on the cot, forcing herself not to wince when her head throbbed from the movement. “Long story short… they caught me sabotaging the memory wipes. Or, rather, Rumlow figured it out once James told Pierce he’d recognized you, after he saw you on the bridge. They tried to kill me. So I had no choice but to go on the run, and they wiped his memory without my intervention. Lucky for me that they couldn’t chase me for long once you two got involved taking them down.”

Steve leaned back on the cot, crossing his arms over his wide chest. Despite the suspicion that still lingered in his features, she could tell at least that he believed her. “And these Russians are after you because…”

“Because they know I’m involved with what they’re after,” she answered. “I’m the only surviving member of the team that commanded the Winter Soldier, so they think they can use me to get to him. Or maybe they think I can help them control him. Either way they’d be wrong – the leads I’ve been following to find him have been one step behind yours, it seems, and I never had any jurisdiction or ability to control the Soldier.”

“But you think you can help him?” asked Steve. “How?”

“I was his psychologist, officially his physician, for five years,” she said, finding the words more and more difficult to say. “I was tasked with making sure he was mentally and physically able to carry out his missions, and I spent hours a day with him while he was out of cryo prepping and debriefing and checking up on him.” The memories swam in front of her eyes, and she had to move to make her head throb again just to clear her mind of them. “…And given that I was able to sabotage his memory wipes enough that he didn’t lose everything… I think I can help him recover. There’s likely no one more qualified than me to do such a thing.”

Steve glanced over at Sam, as if looking for some sort of confirmation. Sam nodded almost imperceptibly, and she resisted the urge to sigh in relief. She could only hope the interrogation would end before her anxiety from the whole situation got the better of her. “Then it looks like we’re in this together,” Steve said once he turned back to her.

She watched them warily. Even if their goals aligned as far as helping Bucky went, she was almost completely sure that their intention was to bring him back to the Avengers with them, to rehabilitate him under Stark and Banner’s scrutiny, and who knows whose else’s. She wasn’t sure that outcome wouldn’t end in disaster for everyone involved, especially given the crimes that would have to be held against him once the public would discover who exactly the Avengers were harboring.

It was obvious, however, that neither of them would be able to do anything about him alone. She knew Bucky’s condition more than any of them did, but they were better equipped to actually find him – not to mention that Steve seemed to be a positive trigger object for him. He was right that sticking together seemed to be their only option. She would have to deal with the rest once they found him.

She nodded her consent, and Steve stood from the cot, a hand outstretched to help her to her feet.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Sam said, picking up where he’d left off, “this stuff isn’t going to pack itself, and I’m certainly not going to do all the work.”


	4. Spiral Out

They took multiple trains and one rental car to make it to Germany, during all of which Sera made as little conversation as possible – not that Steve or Sam seemed too conversational to begin with, given the stress of the situation. From what she could gather, the lead that brought them to Torino, Italy had been the first good one they’d had since the Triskelion fell, mostly because they were operating under the radar of even their fellow Avengers. It seemed Steve knew all too well what the ramifications would be of bringing back HYDRA’s best assassin from the past 50 years into the midst of the world’s main protective force, though he sounded fairly optimistic that he could convince the world of Bucky’s brainwashing and get him off the hook. Sera wasn’t so sure it would work out that way – not without Bucky fully recovering before the world even knew he was still alive. One slip-up otherwise and the image of lethal injection filled her mind.

Naturally, it hadn’t been a fun trip for Sera, especially given that every time she followed that train of thought she had to fight to keep herself from vomiting. It was one thing to go against her pacifist nature to take out a few rogue Russians trying to kill her and her companions, but another thing entirely to imagine such consequences for failure. No matter what happened, or how much he remembered, she couldn’t let him get into the hands of people with such power to destroy him. Steve Rogers may be understandably sympathetic to Bucky’s struggles, but from what she knew of Tony Stark, he certainly wouldn’t agree.

By the time they’d made it to Leipzig, Germany around 2am, she’d also ignored three calls from various contacts, thinking it better to let them believe the worst of her than to risk them betraying her new location. No matter how trustworthy were those that she associated with, they were too close to their target for her to screw things up now.

Leipzig didn’t have nearly as many abandoned buildings for them to commandeer as Torino had, so they settled for a cheap hotel on the east side of town, near the last lead they’d received on their way there. He’d been spotted walking through Friedenspark when the sun went down, only a glint of metal around his hand giving him away in the grainy photograph. Much to her dismay, however, they’d have to wait until sunrise to start their search – which of course she knew was their smartest option, but she hated the idea of him getting further and further away. She wasn’t sure he’d be willing to stay in one place after such a close call in Italy.

Her phone vibrated once almost as soon as she retreated into her separate hotel room next door, and when she pulled it out of her pocket she found she didn’t recognize the number atop the text. Not to mention none of her contacts ever sent text messages.

It was the address of their hotel.

With a lance of panic she turned around to go back to Steve and Sam’s room, when her phone vibrated again in her hand. She left her other hand on the door handle.

_Let’s play hide and seek. Just you, me, and a mutual friend._

She hesitated. Whoever this was, they were going to have rules to their game. She waited for the next text to come in.

_If you tell anyone else about our game, you lose. If you find our friend before I do, you win._

With a frown and a sickening twist in her stomach, she typed out a reply: _What do you gain from playing games with me? Who are you?_

Their reply came as soon as she stuffed her gun in her pocket and put her leather jacket back on. _If I find both of you, I win._

Her stomach twisted again. The game was a trap, and whoever they were didn’t care if she knew that. There was a slim chance she could escape this mysterious figure if she found her target before they could reach her, but there was no doubt in her mind that this figure already knew where he was, and was simply trying to kill two birds with one stone – knowing full well that she’d take the bait. The threat was that if she didn’t, they’d have their hands on Bucky regardless.

Her phone vibrated again. _SchlafGut, Nürnberger Str. 1. There’s no time to waste, Agent Bardem._ And she felt like she was going to throw up.

She gathered the rest of what she would need and then left the room as quietly as possible, slipping her spare room key just under the door to the Steve and Sam’s room – if it came down to it, she hoped they’d gather the rest of her belongings from her room before searching for her. But there’d be no use in worrying about that until they woke up at dawn. She had three hours to find Bucky and lose the mysterious figure that had found them all.

The address she’d received was for a hotel a mile and a half from the one they’d roomed in, and unsurprisingly about the same distance from the park he’d been spotted in earlier that day. She had barely enough money for a taxi over, and even though it was much faster than she would have been on foot, it didn’t keep her from spending the entire short drive on the edge of her seat, drumming her fingers against her leg to quell her nerves. She had no idea what to expect when she arrived.

A block away from the hotel, a bullet shattered the front windshield and the taxi driver shouted and swerved over to the side of the road. The bullet had lodged itself in the seat to her left, barely two inches away from her already injured arm, and the angle of it told her what she had to do. She shoved all the money she had at the taxi driver and got out on the left side of the vehicle, staying in a crouch until she located her next cover.

Another gunshot rang out, skimming the side of the taxi from the sound of it. Bolt action sniper rifle – meaning she had enough time in between shots to make it across the street to her next cover, and she thanked whatever god above that the taxi had stopped so near an alleyway. She sprinted through the alley, heading right towards the hotel and hoping her new contact was playing fair by giving her the right address. It occurred to her as she stopped with her back to the wall at the end of the alley that this all could have been just a sick ploy to get her where they could take her out. But of course, if they’d wanted to kill her, they likely would have been able to snipe her in her hotel room.

She took a deep breath and peeked briefly around the corner – within the space of a second she mapped out how she could reach the hotel across the street while another gunshot rang out, landing in the bricks around the corner where her head had been. She sprinted immediately across the street and ducked behind a parked car, waited the split second it took for the next bullet to land in the pavement, then sprinted directly into the hotel lobby.

The clerk behind the desk shot her an alarmed look, a corded phone up to his ear and speaking rapidly in German, she assumed, to the police to report all the gunshots. Without a second glance she walked briskly to the stairs across the lobby and took them as quietly but as quickly as she could upwards. There was no doubt that if Bucky was indeed here, he’d heard the gunshots too and was likely trying to get out of the building. He had to be on one of the staircases, she thought, as he was way too savvy to risk an elevator or a window.

She reached the top floor, breathing far more heavily than she would have liked, and clenched her fists in frustration as she shouldered open the door to the hall. She sprinted down to the other end, spotting a second set of stairs with a bright exit sign overhead. The moment her hands touched the handle, the door was wrenched open and a hand grabbed the lapel of her leather jacket and pulled her into the stairwell.

She found herself half-balancing backwards over the railing on the landing, the hand gripping her jacket the only thing keeping her from tumbling over. The bearded man attached to the hand was no one she recognized, but there was some type of communicator in his other hand and a triumphant look on his face that only served to piss her off. Distantly she heard doors opening in the landings below them, footsteps moving hurriedly down the stairs.

He moved the communicator closer to his face and held down a button on the side. “Got her, boss,” he said with a grin, shoving her lightly in warning so that she gripped his arm with both of hers and fought to keep her weight on this side of the railing. “You got eyes on the Soldier?”

Her eyes darted over their positioning but she couldn’t find an opening that wouldn’t result in her toppling down the stairs. “Get the hell off of me,” she spat, and he jostled her again in response.

A voice crackled through the communicator. “Lost eyes on the Soldier. Get Agent Bardem to the drop-point.”

The man frowned at the communicator and stuffed it inside his bullet-proof vest, using that hand to grab her other lapel and jostle her again. “You know where he is, don’t you, girl?” he asked her with a smirking scowl.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she hissed.

He pulled her back from the railing and shoved her into the wall next to the stairs down, her head smacking against the painted cement making her head throb anew. “The longer he runs, the more my boss is gonna torture him,” he spat in her face, “and the more he’ll torture you. Maybe they’ll even turn you into him—“

In one motion she pushed up forcefully on both of his elbows with the heels of her palms, breaking the grip on her jacket, and ducked beneath his arms to the left. Before she could move to push him down the stairs behind him, his fist connected with her cheekbone and she stumbled back into the corner. He had a grip on her jacket again, raising his other fist to strike her again, when a loud cracking noise echoed through the stairwell.

He made the mistake of turning around to locate the sound, and she broke his grip again and shoved him back hard, watching as he lost his balance and tumbled down the stairs to the next landing. On instinct she flew down the steps, launching herself over the man by the corner of the railing and taking the rest of the stairs down. The sound had been much too loud for it to have been further than two floors below her, and sure enough, when she reached the second landing down she had to step over a body in a bulletproof vest, a gunshot wound in his forehead and extra ammo slung across his shoulder but no weapon in sight.

Then she heard the sound of footsteps tripled in the stairwell, one set above her and one below, and she flew even faster down the steps, looking over the railing to catch a glimpse of whoever was below. She only barely caught sight of a black sleeve disappearing behind a closing door one flight below, and when she reached the level she threw open the door and sprinted after the figure.

She caught another glimpse of the sleeve and a leg disappearing through the front doors to the hotel, and she dashed across the lobby to catch up, ignoring the shouting clerk and the sirens in the distance outside. Once she was back on the street another gunshot rang out, this time barely clipping her right hip through her jacket, and the slight sting only made her run all the faster. She could see the figure running ahead of her, and she was able to make out shoulder-length dark hair, a dark baseball cap, a black jacket, a backpack before he swung into an alleyway.

The distance between them was closing enough that she didn’t lose him when he kicked open a door in the alleyway and dashed inside, and distantly she figured if this really was who she’d been looking for all this time, then she’d gotten lucky that his route was tripping him up enough that his super-soldier speed didn’t get the better of her. But once she made it into the empty apartment building he’d run inside, she knew she wouldn’t be able to catch up with him the longer they ran.

“Wait!” she shouted after him as he rounded a corner. When she rounded the same, she saw him heading for the stairwell and made a snap decision, shouting “Bucky!” against her better judgment.

But he didn’t stop, merely threw open the door to the stairwell and she barely caught it before it closed as she chased him up more stairs, her lungs starting to burn and the back of her head throbbing.

“Bucky, wait!” she shouted breathily, desperately, trying not to feel hurt that the sound of her voice seemed not to ring any bells for him. On the third floor, he left the stairwell for another long hallway and she was close enough behind. A fleeting thought crossed her mind. _“James!”_ she shouted instead.

This time he looked back over his shoulder as he rounded the next corner, and she saw the flicker in his familiar eyes from concentrated on his running to confused at the face of his pursuer. When she rounded the corner she saw Bucky begin to slow down, more to stop himself from colliding into the dead end he hadn’t anticipated than anything else. Once he’d reached the end, he turned around, his brow furrowed and chest barely heaving from the chase, watching her with a near-panicked look on his face.

Sera stopped ten feet from him, taking on a cautious posture, her hands up to show him she had nothing up her sleeves. “James,” she breathed, and his eyes glinted again in the light from the streetlamp outside the window, brow furrowing further. “I’m here to help you. I’m not with them.”

He watched her suspiciously, eyes flickering from her face down to her right hip and back.

She would have applauded his good eye if she weren’t so concerned about what must be going through his head. Slowly, letting him watch her movements, she reached behind her with her right hand and removed the pistol from her back pocket, holding it between her thumb and forefinger before letting it drop to the floor by the wall. She held her hands back up in her placating gesture, watching his eyes move back to her face with a less guarded expression. 

“You know me,” she said carefully. “Do you remember me?”

He frowned, forehead creasing seemingly in concentration. “I…” he started, his voice huskier than she remembered, likely from disuse. “I don’t know.”

“You used to call me Sera,” she prodded gently. “Do you remember my full name?”

The confusion in his face didn’t fade, but his posture grew more open, and he took a tentative step towards her. Somewhere outside the building she heard shouting, and knew their time was running out to reacquaint each other.

“James,” she said, more urgently, “these people that are after you are after me, too. I think they’re from the same group that you escaped from two years ago. We need to get away from them, but I need you to trust that I want to help you. I left behind two companions of mine that want to help you, too – you know them.”

The uncertainty displayed so openly in his features nearly broke her heart, but she had to let him approach her, not the other way around. She knew how delicately his trust in people must hang by now, regardless of whether he remembered her at all or not. When the shouting outside sounded again, closer this time, she saw the resolve in his eyes as he walked forward carefully. “Who are your companions?” he asked.

“Steve Rogers,” she answered, “and his friend Sam Wilson.”

Understanding dawned though he still seemed slightly (but expectedly) suspicious. Ultimately he walked a little closer, and nodded his consent to follow her, his brow furrowed strangely at the sound of Steve’s name.

She put her arms down and began to lead him out. “Come on,” she said, and broke back into a run.

They ran back down to the ground floor and took a different exit out of the building, listening carefully for where their pursuers were around the area, and finding she’d have to lead them in a roundabout way back to her hotel to give their enemies a wide berth. They ran for several blocks, Bucky following just a step behind her, before the noises she was hearing began to not bode well for the route she’d planned. Somehow they’d started approaching from seemingly all sides, and only by a stroke of luck did she pick a street to run down that they hadn’t seemed to reach yet.

The street took them onto the campus of Leipzig University, and she thanked their good luck that at least no cars would be able to reach them on the campus. Soon enough though the campus grounds ended, and she got a glimpse of their pursuers as they crossed under the highway. It wasn’t just the men in bulletproof vests following them now, but also, it seemed, the German Polizei. Unfortunately with the lack of buildings around the highway, the police glimpsed them as well.

They ran all the faster, dodging between buildings as they began to crop up again, but the police were blocking the route they needed to take northward, forcing the two of them to run further east past the hotel three blocks up. Then she began to hear the gunshots again, not the same sniper rifle she’d heard in the taxi, but shots from handguns, and she couldn’t tell which pursuers were firing anymore.

A bullet caught her left sleeve, missing her arm just barely, but the sound was enough to convince her that they needed to take shelter. Bucky seemed to be one step ahead of her train of thought as he passed her and led her in a sharp turn into another alleyway. After another block they stumbled across an old factory next to a brewery, and he wrenched open the back door and ushered her past him. She ran inside and nearly tripped over some of the machinery that crowded the room, but then led them into an office on the other side of the building, listening acutely for signs of their pursuers.

She caught her breath as Bucky blocked the door to the office with a chair. There was still an hour until sunrise, and she wasn’t sure how they’d get away from the people chasing them. “…I think I need to call them,” she said breathily, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Steve and Sam. They might be able to find a way out for us, or at the very least help us fight them off if it comes to that.”  
Bucky only nodded silently, staying near the door.

She dialed the number Steve had had her memorize. It rang four times before he answered, and she squatted low to the ground to help her catch her breath quicker.

“Hello?”

“Steve,” she said. “It’s Sera. I don’t think there’s time enough to explain, but I found Bucky, and we’re being pursued by men with lots of firearms, could be HYDRA, and the German police as well. We’re holed up in a factory southeast of the hotel. Not sure if we lost them.”

“You—“ Steve started, and then she heard rustling. “Okay, just stay where you are – we’ll find you.”

“I don’t have a location on the people following us,” she warned. “Seemed like they were surrounding us on nearly every side.”

“We’ll get you two out of there,” he said simply, and she heard more rustling in the background. “Law low and stay put.” He hung up.

She put the phone back in her pocket and stood again, crossing her arms as she faced Bucky. “They’re coming,” she said to fill him in. “As long as no one finds us here, we need to stay put. …Do you think we lost them?”

He listened at the door for a second. “…I haven’t heard anything.”

She nodded. She let the silence fall between them, distracting herself with tearing some of the bandages from her arm to apply to her hip where the bullet had skimmed her earlier. It was only deep enough to sting, shallow enough that it hadn’t bled much even between all the running. The dull pain in her left arm was enough to remind her that it could have been much worse.

“Sera…”

She glanced up at Bucky in surprise, watching his features in the near-dark. He seemed to be concentrating hard, his eyes fixed on her face.

  
“You…” he started gingerly. “You’re a doctor…?”

She nodded slowly. “More of a basic physician,” she supplied. “I’ve worked as a psychologist, too.”

He frowned, then nodded after a second. “You were… _my_ physician.”

She only nodded back. If he was going to remember her, he needed to find the memories without too much of her guidance.

He crossed his arms over his chest, his stance widening ever so slightly. “I know your face,” he said. “I’ve had dreams about it before, for… since…” He frowned again. “…But I don’t remember much about you.”

Her mouth twisted. “The last time they did a memory wipe on you,” she said carefully, “I figured they must have erased me, too. They had… fired me shortly before that, so there was no reason for you to remember me anymore.”

He nodded again, not fully understanding and only barely remembering, but it seemed to put him more at ease.

She couldn’t deny her slight disappointment that he hadn’t remembered her in his two years on the run, but, she supposed, it only made sense given that he hadn’t seen her or even heard of her since his last memory wipe. Steve, on the other hand, she knew he must have been focused on remembering since they’d fought after the fall of SHIELD, and of course because his memories of Steve would have been ingrained much deeper than any memories of a physician he only saw for the last five years of his campaign as the Winter Soldier. But all the same…

There was a crash somewhere in the building, and they both jolted upright, hands at their sides, poised ready to act. Light was starting to glow through the window as the sky lit up with the beginnings of sunrise, and she hoped against hope that the timing meant it was Steve and Sam outside the door.

The door knob jostled, and Bucky pulled Sera quietly over to him, backs flat against the wall next to the door. It jostled again, more forcefully, and a second later they began pounding into the door. There were voices in the background, and she noted there were too many for it to be Steve. She tensed, cursing herself for not picking her gun back up after she’d dropped it in the apartment building.

The door crashed open, the chair tumbling to the floor from the force of it, and the second the muzzle of a gun passed through the doorway, Bucky had twisted it out of the man’s hand and hit him over the head with it as he entered the bigger room outside the office. He shot Sera a sharp look before he disappeared through the doorway, as if to say Stay there, before she started hearing gunshots and the muffled sounds of bodies falling to the floor.

She pressed herself closer against the wall, closing her eyes for a brief second to collect herself, before she peeked around into the next room. The gunshots had stopped and Bucky was twisting another gun out of a man’s grip before they fought hand-to-hand for a second. She entered the room cautiously once the man had been felled, making sure Bucky saw her as not to startle him.

But then his gaze moved behind her and the gun went up at the same time that more crashing sounded from behind him. The bullet whizzed past her ear and landed in something behind and to the right of her that sprayed the side of her neck in something warm and wet, before Bucky turned around to face the four men that had just entered. She heard rustling from behind her and she turned quickly and took a step back, but not before another bullet whizzed past her from the man standing before her over the fresh corpse of his cohort.

She leapt forward before he could fire again and hit the gun out of his hand, then decked him across the face and watched as he stumbled backward into another man that had just entered from the door on that side of the building.

There was a clicking noise and the sound of a gun hitting the floor behind her. _“Run!”_ she heard Bucky cry from behind her, and without time enough to look back at him before the man before her raised his gun, she launched off the back of the man she’d punched to the ground and tackled the second one to the ground. His gun skittered off to the side and she leapt to her feet, grabbed it, and sprinted towards the exit, listening to the sounds of footfalls all over the room behind her that told her Bucky had followed his own advice and ran as well.

It wasn’t until she was a block away from the building that she realized Bucky hadn’t followed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! And if I haven't mentioned it before, keep in mind that I started working on this before Civil War was released, so it ends up splitting from the canon while still following the same basic ideas of Bucky on the run, remembering his past, etc.  
> Thanks for reading!


	5. On The Line

If Sera never had to run again in her life, she would die a happy woman.

She’d lost whatever straggler was still pursuing her several blocks back, which was lucky considering she had no idea where she was supposed to go. She stopped running after another block, ducking into an alleyway to pull out her phone. Cursing her situation as she regained her breath, she dialed Steve’s number again.

He picked up on the first ring with a hurried, “Where are you?”

“They found us,” she said quietly. There were a few early birds jogging down the street in the rising light. “We got separated. I’m four or five blocks northeast, next to some café. I have no idea where Bucky went – likely the opposite direction given where he’d been.”

There was rustling and she head Steve sigh in frustration. “We’ll head your way—“

“No, we need to find Bucky before they reach him,” she interrupted, knowing it was their best option as she said it aloud. “I’ll go back and see if I can find him, he should be around the same area I told you before. Just listen for gunshots or fistfights.”

“Alright. Keep your phone on you,” he replied simply, and the line went dead.

She took a deep breath as she put the phone back in her pocket, and let out a soft curse before she began running back in the same general direction she’d come from.

Six blocks later, past the building they’d been hiding in, she began to hear sounds of Bucky’s pursuers, but no sounds of fighting. After another few blocks, she had to duck behind a dumpster as more policemen ran past, shouting something in German she of course didn’t understand. She snuck around the dumpster and peeked around the corner, scoping out the empty street before watching them disappear down a street several blocks away. With no other way to know where Bucky had gone, she figured following the police may be her safest bet.

She counted the streets she would need to cross and doubled back into the alleyway to follow them on a safer path. Once she’d reached the right street, she pressed herself up against the wall and looked around the corner, watching as the policemen she’d seen gathered with several more around their chief halfway down the block. He seemed to be filling them in on something, then answered a call on his radio and turned back to them to start pointing southward and saying something with much more conviction. After a minute more of talking to them they broke into three groups, one heading directly south, another taking the next street down southward, and the chief and his partner getting in their unit to drive east.

Sera retreated back into the alleyway, following the two groups from a distance more by sound than sight. By the time the sound of them running stopped, the sun had risen completely, and she panicked briefly realizing she wasn’t sure exactly where they’d gone. She turned down a street towards where she’d last heard them and had to duck behind the corner last second when she spotted them about to kick down a door to a dilapidated-looking apartment building. They entered after a moment of signing to each other, the crash from the door ringing out through the street.

Before she could even decide to follow them in, police units began showing up from both ends of the street, parking all around the building with their lights blaring. She backed up into the alleyway, out of any of their lines of sight, her heart nearly beating out of her chest. There was no way, no possible openings, that she could get through so many police to reach Bucky if they really had tracked him down to that building.

Then she heard the crashing of a window, a muffled landing of something heavy a second later, footsteps running somewhere above her. Just as she looked up, she caught a glimpse of a man leaping from the top of the building at her back to the roof of the one across from it, and then she was running again.

There were gunshots and shouting from behind as she sprinted down the alley, following the figure leaping from building to building that she knew could only have been Bucky. The buildings were thinning out ahead of her, and soon enough she saw him leap off a three-story one with a sickening flip in her stomach, and she watched as he landed with a crash on top of a car on the street below.

She glanced behind her quickly, caught a glimpse of the police cars far behind them beginning to take off, and shouted Bucky’s name as she faced forward again.

He looked up towards the sound of her voice as he slid off the roof of the car, his eyes widening in surprise but beckoning her to follow him.

So she did.

* * *

Sera and Bucky found themselves in a borrowed car five hours later, leaving Essen on the A40 on their way out of Germany towards Calais, France, which would easily be another four hours. They’d switched drivers almost immediately upon leaving Kassel when Bucky’s hands began to tense on the steering wheel so hard that Sera could feel the deep imprints of his left hand’s fingers while she drove; he hadn’t said what brought on the sudden anxiety, but she hadn’t missed the rebuilt World War II museum they’d passed in town and his subsequent intake of breath. Regardless, she had a feeling she’d be driving the rest of the way, and her left arm was already aching from the stretch of keeping it on the wheel.

Steve had called her after an hour of running and hiding around Leipzig (though they’d lost their tail only half an hour after being reunited,) explaining briefly why he and Sam were boxed in on the opposite side of town but that she had to get Bucky out of the country before their pursuers caught on to how separated the two parties were. Steve and Sam would lead them on a slow chase around Germany, lose them when they could, and planned to meet them in London within two days. Even as she followed his plan, Sera was left wondering if meeting back up with them was really the best idea.

She knew, of course, that Bucky would want to stay close to Steve no matter what she thought best. He’d been running from everyone, Steve included, for two years; yet his decision to avoid Steve seemed to have changed in some small way after she’d first found him, and especially so after he and Steve had talked briefly in the building she’d saw him leap from. She gathered from a short exchange that he’d been followed and trapped in that building by the HYDRA agents chasing him, but Steve and Sam had found him, and freed him after a short talk that convinced them he’d started to regain his memories and was no longer brainwashed to kill them. They’d convinced him to come with them, but were broken up by the German police entering the building, as she’d witnessed.

Bucky, for his part, seemed determined to follow through with whatever they had discussed, and it made Sera anxious to not know what exactly that entailed. She glanced at him briefly when they hit a straighter portion of highway. His head was turned towards the scenery that rushed past, and for how interesting empty fields must have been for him he didn’t seem to really be paying attention to the view at all. Rather, the set of his jaw told her he was somewhere else entirely.

She gave her left arm a rest from gripping the steering wheel and sighed, tightening her grip in her right hand to keep control as the road began to curve gently again. “…How’s your arm?” she asked her passenger after a moment.

He seemed to break from his thoughts as he moved his gaze to the road ahead of them. Then he glanced down at his metal hand and flexed it slowly. “…It’s fine,” he replied.

“You said they’d had it caught in some kind of machinery?” She glanced at him again.

He nodded and watched his fingers move in the glove. “Like a vice,” he said. “But it can… self-correct, under certain stress.”

Her brow furrowed. That must have been the most recent upgrade they made to it, after she’d gone on the run but of course before he had. She couldn’t imagine what kinds of missions they’d intended that feature for, given that the arm was already near-indestructible.

“…You’re bleeding,” he said.

“What?” She glanced over at him again to follow his line of sight, and saw him staring at the arm in her lap, above her elbow. She checked the road before she looked at her arm again, and sure enough there was a large splotch of red seeping through the bandage. Cursing under her breath, she returned her eyes to the road and focused on relaxing her arm. It must have been from keeping that muscle tense for so long before moving it – or perhaps Steve’s stitching hadn’t been as clean or even as she’d assumed. “…You wouldn’t happen to have a first aid kit in that backpack, would you? Or just gauze of some kind?”

“…No,” he replied, his legs shifting closer around the backpack in between his legs. He seemed uncomfortable all of a sudden.

She sighed. “Looks like we’re almost to Duisburg, at least,” she muttered. “We’ll have to pick one up there. I can’t risk making this arm any worse than it already is, not if we run into HYDRA or something again.”

After a few minutes she turned onto the exit for Duisburg, cursing herself again for not learning the language of the country they’d entered enough to ask where the first aid kits were, or to make out the word for “pharmacy.” Bucky seemed to notice the consternation writ on her face however, and after a few more minutes of her looking around for something that resembled a convenience store, he pointed forward and to the left, towards a lit sign with a long German name. When she got closer, it seemed to be exactly what she was looking for, and she turned in to park with a small smirk.

When she returned with a couple first aid kits, three bottles of water, and a handful of granola bars, she found Bucky back in the driver’s seat.

“You sure?” she asked him as she climbed into the passenger seat, moving his backpack carefully to the side to make room for her legs. She handed him a granola bar and opened up one of the first aid kits as he backed out of the parking lot and headed back for the A40 towards the Netherlands.

He only nodded in response.

“Okay,” she said, and began removing the bloodied bandages from her arm. “But if you start to feel stressed or distracted, just tell me. I’d rather keep replacing these than leave you in a bad state.”

He didn’t reply to that, only kept his eyes on the road and, after a moment, one-handedly opened up the granola bar she’d handed him. As he started eating, she checked over the stitches and used one of the water bottles and a piece of gauze from the kit to clean the blood around the wound. The stitches seemed fine but the skin around it was red and irritated – it had definitely been from her putting too much stress on the muscle, and she made a note to pay more attention to it. She was surprised it hadn’t bled through sooner, considering all the running around she’d been doing since they’d reached Leipzig.

“…You’ve said something like that to me before,” he said quietly.

She looked over at him as she finished cleaning the wound. “Said what?”

His brow furrowed slightly. “To tell you if I felt too stressed to do something,” he muttered. “I don’t remember what. But you’ve said it more than once.”

“Yeah, I remember saying it a lot, too,” she replied, before a small smile crossed her lips. She reached into the first aid kit again for the rest of the gauze. “You never did tell me, though. Which is probably why I felt the need to remind you all the time.”

Bucky smirked, but only briefly. He was silent for a while longer while he finished the granola bar and Sera finished re-bandaging her arm. As she was cleaning up the kit and placing it and the extra one in the back seat, he spoke again, barely loud enough for her to make out the words. “…I’ve had dreams about that scar, too,” he muttered, glancing over at her wrist for barely a second before his eyes were locked on the road again.

She followed the glance to her right wrist. A delicate but ragged network of scars wrapped all the way around it, like a bracelet she would never be able to remove, pale and shiny and ugly, two inches wide. The fingers of her left hand touched it absent-mindedly, and she couldn’t help but remember the pain, the fear. “…I usually keep it covered,” she said simply. “In public.” She glanced back at her leather jacket in the back seat, trying to remember why she’d taken it off in the first place.

“I only saw it when you’d reach for things… or for me…” he explained, frowning in concentration. “I’d catch it under your lab coat.”

She sighed softly, watching her wrist again as she continued to feel the scarring. “You never did ask me about it,” she said. “I wasn’t actually sure you’d ever seen it.”

He looked over at her pointedly, as if to say he was asking now.

It took that look alone for her to realize how little he’d ever known about her – even back at base, when he’d been the Winter Soldier, there had never been enough room for him to know who his physician was. Ideally, with the system Pierce had kept up regarding the Soldier, whatever he would learn in between missions never mattered. _It all comes out in the wash,_ he had told her. She shivered before she could stop herself, and looked back down at her wrist. “…It was an accident,” she said finally.

Bucky nodded slightly, but didn’t respond.

“A year after I’d joined SHIELD,” she continued, “they assigned me on an easier mission to field a test weapon they’d had in development. I was the first to try it out – this specially designed knife on a spring-loaded wire – you’d wear two of them, like wrist guards, and the wire was coiled and loaded inside the mechanism.” She gestured to her wrists, her fingers estimating the size of the mechanisms as she could remember. “…The mission was a success and the weapons worked, but in the middle of it all, the right one was put under too much stress, or maybe it was just faulty… Regardless, it collapsed around my wrist before I could get it off.

“I had to finish the mission before another agent could pick me up and get me to the medical lab. I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to save my hand.” She flexed her fingers, stretching them out before clenching them into a fist. “…Anyways, they did – they were even able to repair the nerve damage so I was almost good as new. Now I just have the scarring, and my wrist aches when it’s cold. And they recalled the weapon to work out the kinks for five years, trying to get Tony Stark’s input on it before he swore off weapons manufacturing.”

She dropped her hand back into her lap and watched the road for a while, just in time to catch the sign that meant they’d entered the Netherlands. It’d be another hour before they entered Belgium, but at least the scenery in the meantime was beautiful, even in the cloudy weather.

“That was before you were assigned to me,” Bucky said, and she watched his face for a second before she nodded. He was quiet for a while, his hands flexing idly on the steering wheel. There wasn’t much by way of emotion that she caught pass over his features, but he would frown or purse his lips every now and then, either unaware of or apathetic to her staring. She knew, too, that she would watch his face like this all the time when she was his psychologist, and part of her hoped the feeling of it might help him re-associate. “…You asked me… back there… if I remembered your full name.”

She nodded again.

“Why would I know that?” he asked. For some reason she had the feeling it wasn’t the question he’d really wanted to ask her, that somehow he had settled on this one in lieu of something else, perhaps something more difficult. “…I didn’t know anyone’s names. Not even my own.”

She faced the road again, watching the clouds slowly amble over the cars on the highway. “When you remember, you’ll know,” she said, then smirked. “…I almost didn’t even want to tell you my name was Sera, but we didn’t really have time to let you remember that naturally.”

Bucky didn’t smile, but he nodded, seemingly still concentrating on the murkiest parts of his memory.

Signs for Eindhoven began to fly past her window. Eight more hours to London, and who knows how long before they’d all make it back to the states – Sera felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.

The number that had texted her back in Leipzig was calling her now.

“Did Steve happen to give you a phone?” she asked Bucky.

“Yes,” he said hesitantly, and glanced over at the phone in her hand – before she rolled down the window and tossed it into the wind.


	6. Ill Fenced For Heav'n

They made it to London after eight hours. A brief call from Steve on Bucky’s temporary phone told them they still had two days before they’d be able to meet up, and meanwhile Steve wired money into a discreet account of Sera’s that they could use for expenses until they arrived. She set them up in a cheap hotel closer to Wembley called the Bridge Park Hotel after another brief call to an operator – without the rest of her things, which included a laptop, it seemed they’d be doing everything in a more old-fashioned way.

The room was fairly tiny, with two single beds pushed together within a foot of each other and a small bathroom to the left as they entered. There was a desk and chair in the corner by the window and otherwise limited walking space, but the decorations and coloring of the room helped stave off the claustrophobia she might have experienced. All the same, Sera felt herself gravitate towards the window, lingering there after depositing the shopping bag on the desk that held the first aid kits and extra water bottles, as well as a few toiletries they’d picked up in Dover.

She felt Bucky’s presence behind her before she heard him lay his backpack on the desk next to the bag. He glanced out the window over her shoulder, nodding faintly at their second story view of the narrow street behind the hotel. He stepped away as she turned around, standing almost awkwardly at the foot of the bed closest to the door. The room was so small that his already impressive frame made him seem a giant.

She crossed her arms, unconsciously favoring her left. “There’s a restaurant downstairs if you’re hungry for dinner,” she said, breaking the odd silence. Having left so early in the morning, it was hardly five o’clock yet, but she knew they both needed more than the granola bars they’d snacked on during the drive.

He looked at her warily. “Too public,” he muttered.

“If we go now there won’t be that many people down there. It’s early enough.” She leaned her hip on the desk. “We do need to eat, and it doesn’t look like we have a fridge to have our own food up here.”

He considered her for a moment, then ran his right hand through his hair. “…We’d be safer with more people around.”

 _Ah, right_. She nodded, and turned to empty out the shopping bag onto the desk, separating bathroom items from the water and medical supplies. “Well, maybe we should both shower in the meantime, then,” she offered, then smirked slightly. “The lady at the front desk didn’t seem to appreciate our appearances.”

He looked down at himself, noting the dirty clothes and suspiciously colored stains, the dirt on his right hand that likely matched the dirt all over his face. His gaze moved to her worse appearance, the tear at the hip of her jeans and the blood around it, the spatter of blood on the side of her neck that she’d barely been able to cover up with her long, tangled, gritty hair. She thought she saw the corners of his mouth twitch upwards as he ran his hand through his hair again, realizing how greasy his felt and what that must have meant for how she felt. “You first,” he said, nodding in her direction.

She gave a short laugh. “Yeah, thanks,” she said, and gathered the shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in her arms before heading towards the bathroom. He had to press against the wall to let her pass, her shoulder grazing his chest. She came back out once she’d set down the bottles and removed her boots and leather jacket at the foot of the closest bed.

“Maybe you should take a catnap while I’m in there,” she said, as she carefully removed the bandages from her arm. “I won’t be long but I’m willing to bet you’re even more sleep-deprived than I am.”

He sat gingerly on the edge of the bed next to where she stood and didn’t reply, merely glanced to his left out the window, his jaw clenching slightly.

She’d expected as much, at least. Sleep likely didn’t come easy for him given everything he had racing jumbled around his head, the painful memories she remembered waking him violently while he was in her care. She only hoped the night would be easier than his reaction let on.

Once the bandages were disposed of, she closed the bathroom door behind her, thanking whatever god above that the bathroom wasn’t as proportionally tiny as the bedroom. She turned the water on, stripping while she waited for it to warm and noting that they’d probably need to buy more clothes after dinner. The hotel had a self-service laundry room but she didn’t even have a spare set of clothes to wear while her current ones washed, and she doubted Bucky did either given how thin his backpack looked.

She huffed a laugh at the thought of clothes shopping with the Winter Soldier, then stepped under the spray of the shower head.

Sera emerged from the bathroom twenty minutes later, hair mostly dried from the small hair dryer attached to the wall but grimacing softly at the feel of her dirty clothes against her clean skin. Bucky was sitting in the same spot at the foot of the closest bed, staring out the window, but leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and brow furrowed tightly in concentration. His backpack had moved on the desk, unzipped with the corner of a journal sticking out from the darkness.

“Everything alright?” she asked him, wincing when he tensed at the sound of her voice.

He moved his gaze to the dark-colored carpet and nodded, wringing his hands together idly. She noted he’d removed his jacket, gloves, and boots, too, leaving him in his red henley and dark jeans. The sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and she couldn’t help the natural way that her eyes were drawn to his arms.

She stepped around his knees to hang her towel on the back of the desk chair to dry before turning back towards him. “…Memories?” she asked him tentatively.

His mouth twisted and then he stood, leaving her alone in the bedroom as he went to shower.

The water came on after a moment and she sighed to herself, sitting on the edge of the second bed and brushing her hair out with her fingers. It’d be in both of their best interests for her to start working through his memory issues sooner than later, she knew, but she wasn’t sure how to approach the fact that he would need to remember _her_ first for them to make any kind of progress – it was obvious that he was trusting her more on instinct than anything else, and that level of trust was incredibly weak in comparison to what they would need, and even the level of trust they’d had before.

Of course, the circumstances had been entirely different then. He didn’t rely on her now to get by, and there was no closely packed group of enemies around them for them to silently band against – he’d been on his own for two years now, their enemies rarely close enough to affect them as intimately as before. And if he didn’t remember her, he naturally held no feelings for her one way or another – he had no reason to trust her on any account but the fact that Steve barely did.

The thought made her chest tighten, and she pushed it away. No matter what, she thought, this was about him. There was no point focusing on whatever they had before when there was so much riding on him finding mental stability again now.

She jumped slightly when the bathroom door opened. Bucky emerged in the same dirty clothes as well, but his hair was wet and his skin smooth and clear. The smell of the body wash they’d both used drifted into the bedroom, making her stomach flutter strangely despite the fact that her skin smelled the same.

He sat back down on his bed and began to lace his boots back on. Before she could open her mouth to ask about going clothes shopping before dinner, he was speaking in an even, careful tone. “…Sera is short for something,” he said, frowning gently at his laces. “You always braided your hair when you were working, and you’d take it down when you walked out of the room. None of the other people that worked on me liked you. …Your right hand would shake sometimes when you’d check my pulse for them.”

She stared at him, her left hand idly wrapping around her right, which had started to ache.

He stood from the bed and turned towards her, but watched her hands instead of meeting her gaze. “I don’t remember anything like that about the rest of them,” he said slowly. “Just you.”

Sera nodded after a moment, and his eyes moved up to hers. She offered a small smile as she stood up. “Come on.”

He watched her as she checked her pockets for her wallet. “Where are we—”

“These clothes are filthy,” she answered, still smiling. “We’re going shopping.”

* * *

Bucky frowned at the shirt she held up over the clothing rack.

“Oh, why not?” she said, teetering on the edge of whining but trying to keep from grinning. “It’s just like the one you’re wearing.”

He raised a brow at her. “It’s pink,” he argued. “And neon.”

She sighed and put the shirt back on the rack, only letting herself laugh when she’d walked away to the next rack. She caught him shaking his head with a slight smile as she looked over her shoulder.

They’d walked to an outlet mall further into Wembley, and while the clothes there weren’t as cheap as she’d liked they at least all looked nice. She’d already bought another pair of jeans for both herself and Bucky at the last store, as well as a lightweight Adidas tank top and a plaid, sturdy flannel for herself. Bucky seemed to gravitate towards simple, discreet clothing items but after failing multiple times to hold up a shirt he actually liked, she’d given in to teasing him about his picky style.

 _At least I know he doesn’t like pink,_ she thought, and glanced over to wear he was thumbing through some navy henleys. She found a stack of plain black t-shirts and began to look through them for his size, figuring he’d at least want an undershirt or two.

She approached him a few minutes later with the black t-shirt and a maroon V-neck she’d found as well, as he finally took the navy henley off the rack in the right size. “Do these work?” she asked. “I thought the black would be pretty versatile.”

He took the shirts from her hands, rubbing the fingers of his right hand over the soft material, then nodded and draped all three shirts over his left arm. When he glanced up at her his eyes moved quickly behind her, and as she turned her head to see what had caught his gaze she felt his hand on her lower back pushing her gently forward. There was a man, she realized, trying to squeeze by them between the clothing racks to reach someone on the other side of the store, and he muttered a clipped _Excuse me_ as he passed.

Bucky watched the man walk away, his shoulders tense, his paranoia kicking in, she knew, despite the number of people crowding the store that they’d expected to have to deal with. His hand didn’t leave the small of her back as he glared after him, and Sera, despite herself, felt her cheeks heat.

She touched his upper arm carefully to pull his attention away. “You ready to check out?” she asked.

He looked back down at her, taking a moment to understand what she was asking, and then nodded. “Do we need anything else?” he asked hesitantly, glancing briefly over at where the man had gone, before stepping back and ushering Sera gently towards the cash registers, the warmth of his hand guiding her steps.

“Um,” she said, brushing her hair back out of her face. “Probably underwear, actually. Did you see any in this store?”

He seemed taken aback by the thought, but shook his head after a moment.

His hand didn’t leave her back even as they left the store, Bucky carrying the bag of his shirts while she still carried the two from earlier. She glanced up at him as they began walking towards the GAP Outlet. “James?”

His eyes darted over to meet hers. He still seemed unused to hearing his name.

She cleared her throat and resisted the urge to walk closer to him. “Are you alright?”

“…Sure. Why?”

She glanced pointedly at the arm still holding her – if she was being honest with herself she didn’t mind the contact at all, but the fact that he didn’t seem conscious of it made her think he’d appreciate her drawing it to his attention. “You’ve seemed a little… protective, since that guy brushed past us in the store.”

He seemed to notice where his hand had been resting, now closer to her right hip. He removed it immediately and stuffed it in his jacket pocket to match his left hand. “Sorry,” he muttered. “…Habit.”

She looked up at him as they entered the next store. “Habit?”

He didn’t meet her eyes, brows furrowing. “…I think so, anyways.”

She led him to the men’s section and left him to handle finding his own underwear as she went to the women’s. He was probably right about it being some sort of habit from his past, perhaps a gentlemanly nature still ingrained in his social behavior, if she was to believe what she’d read about Bucky Barnes in the history books. While the Soldier had been anything but, she knew the _soldier_ was quite the charismatic ladies’ man in his day, and she remembered reading letters and small articles mentioning the near infamous way he’d flirt with the civilians on tour or the nurses around the camps. Even if it had nothing to do with his flirtatious nature, it had to at least have been the habit of a 40’s gentleman, to act protectively around ladies even in small ways.

For her own sake, she refused to read into it more than that. People get protective of companions when paranoia runs high, and years on the run from people trying to kill or brainwash him, even spent alone, she knew had to have heightened that sense of paranoia. All the same, she could still feel the warmth of his fingers at her back, and she couldn’t help the way it made her skin tingle no matter how much she chided herself.

She found a couple pairs of black undergarments, frowning at the brand name (simply _Angelina_ ) that stirred memories in her head. She frowned further at the fact that everything black also happened to be far lacier than she would have preferred, but they seemed comfortable and sturdy enough should they have to run or fight again.

Sera turned around then to look for Bucky, but instead ran face-first into a wall of a person.

Bucky reached out to steady her, but thought better of it at the sight of the boxer briefs in his hand. “You ready?” he asked.

“Yes, sorry,” she said, rubbing at her nose. She looked down to check that she hadn’t dropped anything and frowned. “Um… where—?”

She looked up then, and failed to keep from blushing this time. The bra she’d picked out was hanging from his jacket, the hook at the back having clipped onto one of the pockets over his chest when she’d run into him. She plucked it from his clothes hastily and tucked it into her arms, pretending she’d been too quick for him to have seen what had happened but knowing full well that he had. She kept her head down as she passed him – normally, she told herself, she would have been more mature about it, but the tingling still at her back had her feeling awkward enough around her companion already.

She heard him attempt to hide a laugh behind her, the sound escaping as a quiet chuckle muffled by the sound of his hand, and she was still blushing as she approached the counter, dumping the pile of black on top of it and stepping aside to let Bucky do the same. As they waited for the lady behind the counter to ring everything up, he leaned slightly towards Sera’s ear.

“You know, now that I think about it, I don’t think that’s the first time that’s happened to me,” he muttered, and she could hear the smirk in his voice.

It took a second for her to realize the implications of the statement, and she found herself giggling behind her hand at the thought. And then, as she handed the cash over, she couldn’t help but giggle again, realizing how ridiculous the entire situation was: HYDRA and Russian agents both trying to find and kill them, laying low in London on limited funds having not had a proper home for two years, and here they were laughing about lingerie hanging from an ex-assassin’s clothes in the middle of a GAP.

She ran a hand over her face, shaking her head at nothing in particular, as the lady handed Bucky their shopping bag before they left the store.

“That seems like a more _pleasant_ thing to remember about your past, at least,” she commented, still smiling.

He snorted softly at her. “Sure,” he said, “except that wasn’t the only thing she got stuck, if I remember right. Pretty sure her hose caught on my belt buckle and she left crying because I’d ripped them getting them untangled.”

Sera laughed a bit louder than she’d intended. “Poor girl,” she said. “I feel bad for her.”

“I don’t. Only time I can remember being made to feel like a tree.”

“A tree?”

He snorted again. “How do you think she got all her clothes stuck on me? She kept trying to climb me so she could reach my face.”

Sera laughed again and looked up at him thoughtfully after a moment as they crossed the street back towards the hotel. “…You seem to remember more than I’d thought you would,” she mused aloud. “Must be a lot easier when there’s no one around to undo all your work.”

He gave a noncommittal noise and kept his eyes forward, watching each pedestrian carefully as they passed. “…There’s still a lot of holes I can’t fill in,” he said quietly.

They walked in silence the rest of the way to the hotel, and she found herself simultaneously pleased at his progress and challenged by what work he had left to do. It seemed he could remember a lot of small moments and details, and he must have patched them together fairly well over the last few years, but she could imagine there were a lot more holes in his memory than he possibly even realized.

The two reached their room again, and Sera emptied all the shopping bags to sort her clothes from his so she could change in the bathroom. When she emerged, she was glad to see he’d done the same, and while his new clothes weren’t all that different stylistically from his old ones, they seemed to fit him more snugly around the hips and shoulders, and with his hair clean and now dried out from the wind, she was almost surprised at how strikingly handsome he looked.

Bucky seemed to have a similar opinion about her new tank top and black skinny jeans, and her long hair falling in waves over her shoulder. She eyed the new bandage around her left arm for a second before putting on her new flannel, folding the sleeves up to her elbows but leaving it unbuttoned to function like a jacket. He was still staring at her when she looked up, and she regarded him with a questioning look.

“…Everything I’ve remembered comes by triggers,” he said, his eyes roaming over her distantly, as if trying actively to trigger himself. “Or in dreams, sometimes. Your scar reminded me. Your hair. The way you talk sometimes. But I still can’t remember anything else about you.”

She pursed her lips for a second before his eyes met hers again, still concentrating in a way that had her wondering if it was really her he was looking at. “…The circumstances are much different now than they were when I was your physician,” she offered. “I’m sure if I wore a lab coat, for instance, it might make it easier for your brain to make the connections. I’m sure it’ll come to you. It’ll just take a while.”

His eyes seemed to focus more on hers. “…You said you could help me?”

She nodded. “I think I can,” she said. “But you have to be able to trust me first… and I can’t expect you to do that when you don’t feel like you know me.”

He watched her for a second, then took a deep breath and turned towards the beds distractedly.

She stepped back towards the door, grabbing her wallet from her other pants as she turned her body to make space for him. “Let’s go down and try that restaurant. Maybe getting some real food in you will help you focus,” she said, smiling.

He still seemed distracted for a moment more before he scratched the back of his head and nodded, moving forward to usher her through the door with a gentle hand at her back.


	7. Flashes

The rain started pouring sometime during the middle of the meal, after Sera had finished her half of the salad and started in on the white bean pasta. Bucky ate much faster than her despite how often he seemed distracted by the other patrons in the restaurant or the cars driving past on the wet road through the window, and his flickering gaze only intensified once he had no more of his meal to keep him occupied. He had downed three glasses of water since they’d sat down, and Sera smiled at the waiter as he returned to fill his fourth, and her second.

“…Do you want any of my pasta?” she asked after a moment, leaning slightly to the side to catch his gaze where it lingered past her shoulder. When his eyes met hers, she offered, “It’s just as high in protein as your steak was.”

He shook his head, and crossed his arms over the table, glancing down at his clean plate.

“We should order something else,” she suggested. “Dessert at least. Just to be safe.”

“Safe?” he asked, a brow raised. He glanced past her again towards the window before continuing to meet her gaze.

“In case anything happens and we don’t get a good meal for a while,” she said, then explained further at the tensing of his jaw, “I don’t think anything _will_ with our friends distracting them for now, but it doesn’t hurt to stay on our toes a little.”

He nodded, and tapped on the table idly with the fingers of his right hand. “We’ll take something back up to the room,” he said.

She nodded back, noting his tense shoulders. Perhaps she should have felt just as nervous as he did, but it was in her nature to over-compartmentalize her anxieties, always with the thought that she’d need the energy of that anxiety in more dire situations than those of, say, sitting in a restaurant on the outskirts of London. She finished her meal in deep thought before she looked back up at the man across from her.

His eyes were already on her this time, his jaw clenched slightly and fingers tapping idly on his left arm instead. “…How exactly do you think you can help me?” he asked hesitantly.

The rain picked up behind her, the wind blowing larger drops against the panes of the giant window. “…I suppose that depends on which parts of your memory you’re still missing,” she said, just as hesitantly. “It’s possible that just having me around to coach you will speed up the process based on our history. But generally I don’t know _how_ for sure until I have an understanding of what you still need.”

His hands stilled, shoulders less tense than before. “But you already have an idea,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t be so sure of yourself.”

“Yes,” she conceded. She laid her silverware down on her empty plate and crossed her arms in a near mirror of his posture, then lowered her voice. “Mainly because I know the types of things they’d wash out of you, and the things that should have stayed after I sabotaged them that still didn’t. There were memories I tried to let through the cracks that wouldn’t resurface, things you subconsciously repressed. Of those I’m certain you still haven’t recollected.”

The fingers of his left hand stretched and clenched into a fist, almost experimentally, the soft whirring of the mechanics only loud enough for her to catch over the background noise of the restaurant. “…But I still can’t remember you,” he said tensely. “Why would I repress that?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I don’t think it’s repression. The last wipe they did on you was the worst they’d ever done, especially since I wasn’t there to do anything about it. And since it was only ever meant to target your episodic memory system and part of your emotional, the non-traumatic memories should be the first to come back over time. It’s possible you just hadn’t been triggered to remember me, like you mentioned earlier. But there may have been an emotional connection somewhere that became somewhat traumatic after…” She brushed her hair away from her face. “Well.”

“What happened?” he asked. “…That would have been traumatic for _me_?”

“I think that’s something you’ll need to remember on your own,” she said gently, “before I can explain what happened. In any case you might be able to just figure it out.” The waiter came by then, and Sera asked him for another dish to go, as well as the check. When he walked away, she took a drink of her water.

“…It’s important that I don’t fill in the blanks for you,” she continued. “I’ll help and try to jog your memory where I can, but it’ll make your recovery harder if you don’t do the actual recollection on your own.”

Bucky nodded after a moment, glancing around the room while the waiter returned with a meal box and Sera paid the check in cash. She made to stand from the table, but paused to wait for him when he seemed to still have something to say. “I—“

She heard a buzzing from underneath the table, watching his eyes widen slightly before he reached into his pocket and pulled out the temporary phone Steve had given him. He seemed to recognize the number, and regarded it with a wary expression before wordlessly handing it over to Sera to answer.

Steve didn’t wait for them to speak first. “Buck? We have a problem.”

“It’s Sera,” she supplied cautiously. “What happened?”

“Sera? Is Buck alright?”

“Yes, just occupied,” she said, glancing over at Bucky where he was watching her anxiously. He stood and gestured for them to head out so as not to be overheard.

She followed him back up to the room as Steve continued. “Our tail is missing. Looks like they’ve either given up or found out Buck isn’t with us. We’re going to wait here one more night and if we still haven’t tracked them we’ll catch a flight early tomorrow morning to meet you two.”

“You think they’re onto us, then?” she asked. Bucky glanced back at her quickly, his hand stilled on the door to their room.

“Can’t be sure. I have some eyes and ears over there that haven’t seen anything yet but we’ll know if they enter the country. Just stay low and don’t leave wherever you’re staying until I call again.”

She nodded at Bucky to communicate they’d be alright, and he opened the door finally and ushered her inside. “Alright. We’ll have the phone on us.”

“And Sera?”

She stilled where she’d been setting the food down on the desk. “Yes?”

“If anything happens to him—”

“You’ll be the first to know,” she interrupted, chest tightening. “…He’s in good hands, Captain.”

“…For all of our sakes, I hope he is.” And the line went dead.

She handed the phone back to Bucky, hoping he didn’t misinterpret the tension in her face and arms. “They lost the tail, so if they don’t track it down again before morning they’ll fly and meet us here. He said he’d call if it looks like we need to move, but we should be okay for now. He said we probably shouldn’t leave the hotel just to be safe.”

He watched her warily, and she forced herself to take a calming breath. “So they’re not onto us yet?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. She sat down on the bed by the window to take off her boots. “Just turn the sound up on the phone so we don’t miss him while we sleep tonight. I’m guessing they’ll be flying out at sunrise if they don’t find anything, so we should turn in in the next couple of hours.”

He nodded and messed with the phone for a bit before setting it down on the desk.

She took her flannel off and considered him for a moment as he followed her lead and removed his boots. “…You were saying something before he called,” she said hesitantly.

He glanced up at his backpack, then back over at her before he finished taking his shoes off. “Just that…” he started, then ran a hand through his hair, pushing the messy strands out of his eyes. “…I’d been writing everything down.” He nodded towards the backpack, and the corner of the journal poking out made much more sense to her. “As I remember things, or… I’d found a few articles about – about Steve that helped. To try to make sense of it all.”

She smiled a little. “That’s actually a really good idea. It probably sped up the process a lot.”

He nodded. “I hadn’t written anything down in a week,” he said quieter. “Before today. …The small stuff I’d remembered about you.”

“…I can give you some time alone if you want to work on it more.”

“No,” he said, and his gaze met hers. “It… He said we probably need to stay put. We shouldn’t separate.”

“Alright,” she said, offering him a small smile once more. More likely than not her presence helped him to remember what he was missing about her – and besides, a large part of her was glad he didn’t want to be alone. Her sense of protectiveness had only heightened after Steve’s attempted warning. Shaking her head of the thought, she stood and opened up the food they’d brought up, taking a plastic fork and then handing one to Bucky. She sat with her legs in the tiny space between the two singles, placing the open food container between them. “We’d definitely better stay well fed now.”

He glanced at the meal. “…I don’t remember macaroni and cheese being that orange.”

“It has pumpkin in it,” she said. “Don’t give me that look – I’ve made some similar stuff before, and it’s really good. Even if you don’t like it it’s high in carbs and protein, so we’ll be set.”

He grimaced but took a bite. His expression eased and he took a larger one.

“Told you.”

* * *

Despite the uncomfortable size of the beds, the comforters were so cozy and secure that she drifted off to sleep in less than a minute – of course this probably also had something to do with the fact that she’d been awake for two days straight. Bucky told her at her insistence that he’d try to sleep at some point but not to hold her breath. Even as tired as she was, she was enough of a light sleeper that his rustling about the room woke her up several times throughout the night in a hazy, comfortable daze that lasted only a few seconds or so.

The first time she opened her eyes, the moonlight falling in from the window lit upon Bucky’s shoulders hunched over the desk, his head resting in his left hand and his right scribbling quickly in what she assumed was one of his journals. She’d had a dream about her little sister – as she often did – that had ended with Sera falling from a swing, into her bed with a slight jolt.

The second time she wasn’t sure what had woken her, but he was in the same spot now with both hands holding his head, his fingers buried in his hair and shoulders taut with stress; she empathized with his stress briefly before sleep retook her.

On the third time she watched him get up from the desk and move towards the bathroom out of her line of sight, heard rustling somewhere behind her, and she sighed almost gratefully into the pillow and fell back into a dreamless sleep. Her bed was so warm despite the cold English night.

She awoke the fourth time with a coil of panic in her stomach, simultaneously forced to acknowledge how much stress she’d put her wrist under when she became conscious of how much it ached. Before she could wonder why the pain hadn’t woken her before now, the sound that had woken her up faded into her consciousness as if she’d woken up a second time. Suddenly the panicked feeling made too much sense.

She rolled to her right side underneath the comforter, her gaze alighting on the shaking figure tangled in the covers of the bed next to her.

Bucky was moaning in his sleep like he were in a great deal of pain. His head turned from side to side and his left arm was wrapped around his waist as if he was favoring it even in his dreams. The moonlight glinted off of it, the bottom two points of the painted red star peeking out from beneath the sleeve of the maroon V-neck she’d picked out. He gave another pained groan and she sat up in her bed.

Her hand reached out to wake him but apprehension flooded her nerves and she drew back. If the dream was bad enough, waking him could be disastrous. But taking in the way he held his weaponized arm to his body, there was a good chance that wouldn’t be the arm he’d lash out with if it came to that. Regardless, she couldn’t just let him suffer in his apparent nightmare – her chest ached at the thought of what images, what memories of feelings must be plaguing him. She reached out again with her right arm this time, crawling forward until her knees rested on his bed past the tiny distance between them – at least if things got violent he wouldn’t damage the stitches of her left arm.

Her hand met his chest, but after several pounding heartbeats she realized he seemed not to register the touch.

“Bucky?” she tried, gently pushing his chest and wincing at the throb in her wrist. She tried again, intending to shake him harder. “…James?”

A lance of pain shot through her nerves from her wrist all the way up her arm.

His hand had wrapped around her wrist before she had time to register his movements, both of them crying out in the darkness. When she opened her eyes he had her wrist pinned to the headboard, and she cried out in pain again when she unconsciously tugged at his vicelike grip. His eyes were wide, flitting between her hand and her face, and when her left hand came to grab her other arm in a pitiful attempt to relieve the hurt, he released her and sat back on the far edge of his bed, breathing heavily.

She hugged her wrist to her body, wincing, forcing herself to breathe deeply through the smarting, breath-taking ache. Bucky’s look of shock quietly transformed to one of dull horror. The remnants of his dream seemed to be mixing with the realization of what he’d just done. It dawned on her that he’d grabbed her with his right hand, not his left, and she shuddered at the thought of how much worse it could have been.

“Are you okay?” she asked him shakily, still wincing as her wrist began to throb more sharply with her heavy heartbeat.

“You—” His brow furrowed, eyes still wide and staring at her wrist as she held it to her chest. He seemed to make the connection that he’d injured the scarred one, the one she’d told him bothered her in the cold, the one he remembered. Shaking his head, he looked back up into her face. His eyes shone in the moonlight. “Why the hell did you wake me?”

“You were having a nightmare,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Your arm was hurting you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay—“

He stood from the bed suddenly and ran his right hand over his face. His left was still tucked against his torso. “You told me to sleep,” he muttered angrily. “This is exactly why I don’t. I can’t control – I don’t… I don’t need sleep anyways—“

“Yes, you do—“

“ _Just_ —“ His fist clenched against his temple, and it seemed to take a considerable amount of effort for him to relax the muscles and put his arms down. After a deep breath, he rubbed at his eyes and sat back down at the desk, sideways in the chair so he could still face her. “Go back to sleep.”

Sera returned to the middle of her bed but made no move to lay back down under the covers. “James…”

He looked up and his eyes flickered from her face, his expression softened at the sound of his name, down to her wrist that she still hugged against her breast. They moved across the rest of her briefly, as if making sure he hadn’t caused any more damage, but he seemed to get more than he bargained for when they lit upon her bare legs and moved hurriedly back to her face.

She pulled the covers up over her legs idly as she asked him, “What were you dreaming about? …You sounded like you were in a lot of pain.”

His eyes darkened and he looked away from her. The metal of his arm glinted as he slid his elbows down to rest on his knees, and he watched the plates move as he controlled them. “…I was…” he started, but then shook his head. “I’m fine.”

She frowned, and fisted the sheets at her hips. “…Do you write down your dreams, too?”

He shook his head more slowly. “…They’re too painful. I… don’t usually get a chance to when I wake up.”

“Try this time,” she said softly. “If you can still remember it.”

A siren sounded somewhere off in the distance. “Just flashes,” he said. His fingers laced together and he continued to watch them move. A long moment passed before he spoke. “…I’m sorry for hurting you.”

She shook her head, but before she could say a word to protest his guilt, he rose from the chair and moved around the side of his bed, ruffling through something on the floor. He straightened with what looked like his red shirt, and she heard a ripping sound before he came back to her bed. He handed her a long piece of the red cloth – it looked like one of the sleeves – and she took it with brow furrowed.

“Use that to wrap your wrist,” he said quietly, sitting back down at the desk in the same posture as before. He didn’t meet her eyes.

She did as he suggested, wincing every now and then, and tucked the ends in tightly when she was done. Her wrist still ached but wrapping would help with the pain as she slept. She looked back up at him. “James…”

He shook his head slightly and brushed his hair behind his ears so she could see the deep furrow of his brow. “Go back to sleep, Serafima.”

Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest.

Bucky’s frown deepened, and he closed his eyes in confusion. Then, silently, he turned away from her towards the desk, resting his elbows on the surface and his head in his hands, one of his journals still open beneath the hunch of his shoulders.

_Serafima._


	8. A Place to Wring Our Hands

Sera woke to a phone ringing. Before she even had a chance to consider why she should care about such a thing, she was sitting up in the light of the sunrise and had one foot on the floor as if she meant to answer it herself. When she’d woken up fully, she watched Bucky cross to the desk in one stride and answer his phone himself, but not before she caught the look of anxiety that flashed across his face.

She heard a deep voice speaking on the other end, and while Bucky was distracted listening to it she grabbed her pants from the end of the bed and pulled them on quickly.

“A connecting flight?” he asked in monotone.

So they had lost their tail. She began to compose a list in her head of what they’d need to do in the meantime, or once they arrived, or after they’d discussed their options. Idly she wondered how useful they’d think her once the Avengers had locked Bucky up, and she shook the thought away before standing from the bed, her back against the wall.

“Do you need—” He seemed to be interrupted. After a moment he nodded faintly. “Alright.”

She became aware of the increased ache in her wrist, and she raised it with the intention of checking for swelling before the red cloth she glimpsed wrapped around it stopped her short.

There was a pause on the other end that broke her away from the previous night flooding back into her memory, before she heard the deep voice say something quieter. Bucky didn’t respond, and she heard the voice again after a moment. “…Yes. I do.” When the other end stayed silent, Bucky hung up and placed the phone back on the desk.

“Does anyone know we’re here?” she asked when he turned to her. She imagined Steve had ended the call in much the same way as he did hers: somehow expressing his concern for Bucky’s safety.

“He didn’t mention it so I don’t think so,” he replied. She noted then that he was fully dressed already, his boots laced, and missing only his jacket. “He said they’re boarding a flight to London right now, but they’ll have to connect in Brussels. Should take about three hours before they land.”

She nodded, and looked around at the room. “Alright,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ll go down and get all these clothes washed so we’ll be ready to go when they get here. I can probably pick up some breakfast for us on the way back up.”

He shook his head. “I’m coming with you.”

It seemed he didn’t trust that some of their enemies hadn’t made it past Steve’s “eyes and ears” in the city, and she didn’t blame him. She’d learned the hard way, she thought, just as he had, that they were much more tenacious than they led their targets to believe. Having been the best of them, Bucky’s paranoia was likely very well placed, even if he didn’t remember much of that era of his life.

She nodded when she realized she’d been staring at him, and began to gather their filthy clothes from the pile she’d pushed them into on the floor. As an afterthought she grabbed her wallet as well, stuffing it into her back pocket and attempting to hide the wince that came with using her right hand.

She’d made it to the door before Bucky cleared his throat pointedly, and turning she saw him holding up her boots.

A slight blush spread over her cheeks, and she approached him with the pile of laundry in her arms, the socks on her feet catching on the carpet. “I’ll trade ya’,” she said, and laughed quietly when he smirked.

* * *

 

Less than an hour and a half later, Steve called again. They were already in the middle of pulling the clothes from the dryer in the small laundry room on the ground floor of the hotel when the vibration startled Bucky, and without a word he removed the phone from his pocket and handed it to her. She tried to send him a questioning look but he went back to pulling the clothes out and began folding them as she answered.

“Steve?”

There was a beat before Steve began to reply, “Is—”

“Yes, he’s fine,” she interrupted. “Doing laundry, actually,” she supplied in case the Captain began to feel anxious about her answering a second time. “Everything alright?”

Steve cut to the chase quickly, as he seemed wont to do. “There’s a situation in West Africa that the team’s being called in for,” he said. The worry must have shown on her face as Bucky stopped folding to focus on her. “It’s turning into an emergency situation and we have to get down there. As soon as it’s cleared up we’ll meet you guys in London but I’m not sure how long it’ll be – maybe a day or two, maybe more if something goes wrong.”

“And you’re absolutely sure no one’s found us? That we’ll be able to law low until then?”

“As sure as I can be. There are some former SHIELD agents there keeping an eye out for me but I can’t exactly tell them who they’re protecting or where he is. I’ve called them already to put them on alert and gather more eyes and ears.”

She stood from the washing machine she’d been sitting on in an attempt to quiet her nerves. Something about the situation was giving her a bad feeling, but she couldn’t tell if it was her own paranoia talking or not. “You sure you can trust these contacts of yours? These agents we’re dealing with are no joke—”

“Brandt—” she winced visibly at the alias and what she was sure he was about to say “—I’m not even a hundred percent sure that I can trust _you_. But I’m relying on you to keep him safe. …I won’t lose him to them again.”

She tucked her wrist under her elbow as she held the phone to her ear in silence.

Bucky folded the last shirt hastily and turned his body to face her completely, watching for visual cues and listening for Steve’s voice on the other end.

“If I hear anything from them during this mission,” Steve continued, “I won’t have a lot of time to reach you, so I’ll have to send a text message. If you receive anything from my number, pack up immediately and run. It won’t be safe enough to fly all the way to the States but just keep moving until I contact you again. You copy?”

“Roger that,” she said, keeping her voice steady before she lowered it. “I’ll keep him safe.”

He stayed on the line for a few beats before he hung up, and Sera handed the phone back to Bucky. Wordlessly he put it back in his pocket and gathered their clothes to head back up to the room. Once he’d locked the door behind them and laid the clothes on the desk next to his backpack, he turned to her in tense silence.

She took the cue. “The Avengers were called into a mission somewhere in Africa,” she relayed. “He said it sounded like an emergency and they had to go. He’s called his allies here in London and put them on alert for us, but we’ll have to lay low until he and Wilson finish with the mission, and we’ll fly out to the States when they get back.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “How long?”

“A few days, maybe.”

He nodded and looked around the room, at the space between the beds, the end tables pushed into the corners, the macro photograph of a flower hanging on the wall for decoration. The hard set of his jaw twitched slightly before he moved his gaze to a spot on the carpet near her feet. “…What’s waiting for me in the States?”

She leaned on the corner of wall by the bathroom door. “Captain Rogers didn’t tell you?”

“Not… not really,” he said. “I assumed he wanted to take me wherever he and his team are holed up. He mentioned protection.”

“That’s part of it, I’m sure,” she said, trying to keep the feeling of wariness out of her tone. There was no doubt protection was exactly what Steve wanted for him, but Sera also had no doubt that others would want a little better than that – likely a trial. Prison. Worse. But she had no way of knowing which of these things would come to fruition, and certainly no desire to worry Bucky with any of them. “I don’t know what awaits you there either. I think the Avengers have a compound now, where they train and live most of the time, but while I’m sure Steve will want you there I don’t know what his plan is. I’m not exactly involved.”

His gaze moved to her face. “You’re not?”

She shook her head cautiously, watching as he regarded her. “I only ran into them in Italy when we crossed paths looking for you,” she explained. “They trusted me enough to help them find you, and we fought together on the run, but given what I told them of my history Rogers doesn’t trust me completely. I’m sure he warned you to be careful of me…” Her mind flitted back to the phone call she’d woken up to.

“No,” he said, and her brows raised in surprise. He sat down on the corner of a bed and crossed his arms. “He asked me if I trusted you.”

She pushed off from the wall and took a step forward, crossing her arms as well and watching his face apprehensively. Her heart was beating hard against her chest despite her effort not to read into it. “Do you?” she asked him quietly.

The near calm demeanor of his features answered her enough, especially when his arms uncrossed, his body language slightly more open; nonetheless he answered her verbally so there was no mistaking it. “Yes.”

Her heartbeat sped uncomfortably and she held her arms closer to her body. “Even though you don’t know me?”

His brow furrowed almost in confusion. “But I do know you.”

She stepped forward again and sat on the other bed, body turned to face him as she tried to relax her arms. Something like hope was blossoming in her chest and she quenched it to avoid the possibility of disappointment – not that she was terribly successful.

“You… you said my name last night. Before I went back to sleep.”

A shadow passed over his eyes as he looked at her, she assumed of the memory of everything he’d woken up to the night prior. When his eyes cleared, they roamed over her face and the furrow in his brow deepened. “…It sounded right,” he said.

The blossom of hope faded from her chest and she nodded. “It is right,” she said. “But you still don’t remember…?” The question escaped as more of a statement.

He shook his head, but stopped and ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. “ _Serafima_ ,” he repeated softly.

Her heart was still pounding, and it jumped at the sound of her name in his mouth. She supposed she was just as used to hearing hers as he was to hearing his, and the thought made her sadder than she expected to feel.

Bucky frowned.

Feeling strangely determined, she inched slightly forward on the bed towards him. “It might help if you try to focus on the way you might have learned my name,” she offered. “Can you see it written down? Or hear the sound of it in my voice?”

He looked off to the side, attempting to focus as she suggested. She could hear it herself – the sound of her own voice speaking her name to him, the hushed tones, without the inflection her parents used to use when they would say it – and part of her hoped her own concentration on the memory might reach him across the space between them like a prayer.

There was a knock at the door.

Both of them were standing in the space of a second, bodies turned towards the sound and taut with alarm. After a second of silence, Bucky moved soundlessly around her, the tips of his fingers brushing across her shoulders to let her know he was behind her, and he came to stand between her and the door despite the hand that grabbed his shoulder in order to pull him back.

The knocking sounded again, and then a voice sounded from behind the door:

“ _Housekeeping!_ ”

There was a charged second before the comprehension dawned on them both, and Sera lowered her hand from his shoulder as he turned almost sheepishly back towards her.

“One moment!” Sera called, and then she couldn’t help the nervous giggle. She passed a hand over her face and caught Bucky smiling as he ducked his head. She moved to the side and gestured to the desk. “Grab your backpack, and we’ll go eat breakfast downstairs while she cleans the room.”

* * *

 

When they returned from dinner later that night, she left Bucky to his notebooks and decided to take a late shower, if not to rectify how oily she felt her skin and hair already becoming than certainly because the hot water would soothe her nerves. Regardless of how far away the threat seemed given that Steve hadn’t sent them anything, something about the situation or at least about the quiet tension in Bucky’s shoulders had seen to her growing anxiety. It didn’t help that it would be all too easy for a foe to ambush them considering their lack of any sort of weaponry aside from Bucky’s arm and their own wits.

The shower had her sighing underneath the spray, breathing in the steam with calming breaths. With a grimace she acceded to the fact that her nerves likely had a lot to do with their conversations that morning: the pressure she could feel from Steve to keep his best friend safe, how little she knew of what would happen to Bucky once they’d returned to America, and (she considered with a fluttering in her stomach) her name that he had somehow recalled despite not really remembering where the knowledge had come from. She relished the fact that he trusted her, that somewhere along the way or somewhere deep in his subconscious he had come to trust her intentions to help him, but she couldn’t help the disappointment that he still didn’t really know her.

Not, she supposed, that he knew her all that well before his last memory wipe to begin with. They had never had time or security enough for him to know things like how she took her tea, or what she’d majored in at college, or where her sister was; and admittedly she knew an incongruous amount of information about him just by way of her job requirements. But he’d known her, in some intimate, innocent way she’d never been able to understand, and she’d known him in much the same regard.

Maybe she was fooling herself – after all, doctor-patient relationships were always inherently imbalanced, and he’d relied on her for more than would ever be healthy. Yet somehow she knew. Somehow – perhaps by the way he’d look at or talk to her, perhaps by some gut feeling or guiding hand of divine intervention – she knew she couldn’t dismiss what she felt.

As she rinsed her hair of the conditioner, she almost wished she could. It likely would have made everything a hell of a lot easier.

She shut the water off and began to prep herself for bed, toweling off her hair and braiding it so she wouldn’t have to worry about sleeping on it. She cursed herself for not thinking to buy pajamas when they’d been out shopping, but slipped her tank top back on and, begrudgingly, her jeans. It had only been marginally embarrassing the night before when she’d forgotten that she’d removed her pants to sleep, and she fully intended to do the same tonight, at the very least to take advantage of the luxury of sleeping in a real bed with real covers for once.

When she exited the bathroom, Bucky was in the same spot at the desk where she’d left him, but his journals were all packed up and he was fiddling distractedly with the cap on a water bottle. He didn’t look up as she sat on the bed behind him, gently toweling excess moisture from her braid. It was hardly eight o’clock but already she was tempted to fall asleep just seeing how tired and sleepless he looked.

“You should try to sleep again,” she attempted.

He replaced the lid on the bottle suddenly as if waking from a daze. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t.”

“I can stay up for a bit,” she offered. “Let you sleep a while, and then if you start having nightmares I can catch it soon enough to—”

“No.”

She frowned at the gruff tone of his voice, and dropped the towel from her hair.

His shoulders eased and he turned in the chair, leaning forward on his elbows with his eyes trained on his hands. His voice softened almost apologetically. “It doesn’t matter how soon you’d wake me. I’d lash out and hurt you again, and besides that the sleep is restless anyways.” His mouth pursed for a moment and then he relaxed. “I’ll be fine.”

Now she definitely felt like turning in early, if only to give him some semblance of space. She knew there’d never be any hope of convincing him to sleep again after he’d grabbed her – in his place she would have felt just as guilty and avoidant. “Alright,” she said. “But you can wake me if you change your mind.”

And she leaned over to the end table and turned off the lamp, crawling under the covers and removing her jeans slightly awkwardly so she could sleep.

She hadn’t drifted off for more than a couple of hours before she felt a metal hand shaking her awake. The lights were all off but she could make out Bucky leaning over her bed in the moonlight, muscles coiled like a tiger listening for its prey, and when he saw her eyes on his he pressed a silver finger to his lips and then pointed to the door.

Her head lifted slightly and she listened – and _there_ – hushed voices in the hallway, heavy boots muffled by the carpet, a pair of mechanical clicks she couldn’t place.

He gestured silently for her to follow, and as quietly as she could she stood from the bed and slid her jeans on, found her jacket on the floor and slipped her arms in. Bucky was stuffing their extra clothes and water bottles in his bag and securing it on his back, and as she laced up her boots the sickening feeling in her gut jolted at the sound of the noises outside drawing closer. Her wide eyes met Bucky’s in the darkness.

He pocketed the phone and jerked his head towards the window before he moved almost mechanically to slide it open as silently as possible. When he’d opened it as wide as it would go, he reached for her and she moved forward, letting him usher her through with a stiff hand on her back. The window opened to a small balcony, not built to stand on but sturdy enough, and the drop was short enough she’d be fine if she landed right.

It was as she was climbing over the railing of the balcony that she saw the shadows in the light underneath the door to the room, and she glanced panicked at Bucky, who gestured animatedly for her to drop. As she lowered herself to hang from the ledge of the balcony and not the railing, he climbed after her, sliding the window shut with what little space he had. She let go and dropped to the ground, bending her knees to lessen the impact, and then heard crashing from inside.

Bucky jumped over the railing almost frantically and landed hard beside her, then grabbed her hand and started running. The glass of the window shattered behind them, and she could make out the sound of Russian yells that followed them echoing down the street.

Then, gunshots.


	9. Daybreak

The wet pavement amplified the sounds of their footfalls in the early morning air, echoing off the walls of the narrow street they’d turned onto. Bucky had let go of her hand but seemed to struggle to run at her slower pace though she was running as fast as she possibly could.

_How the hell did they find us?_ she thought frantically, looking back over her shoulder for a second before they turned into an alleyway. At the pace they ran she was sure they wouldn’t shake them until they reached the denser part of the city, but they were far enough out from the center of London that running wouldn’t get them there fast enough. She looked to Bucky, gauging how sure of his route he seemed.

His shoulder brushed hers and she turned with him, but the sight ahead had them skidding to a stop. Two men cut off their path, one talking quickly into a coms unit and the other aiming an AN-94 assault rifle straight at them. She pushed Bucky out of the alleyway around the corner, falling gracelessly as the gunshots started before they both scrambled to their feet and took off running again.

She could see the men from the hotel rounding the corner behind them, and she led them left onto a busying street. They crossed through the growing morning traffic and hit another smaller street after a block, turning right and running ever faster.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she huffed beside him, heart beating wildly with adrenaline.

He nodded forward and she looked at the nondescript scenery of the English neighborhood, then noticed the light from the sun rising somewhere behind them and to their right. So they _were_ headed southeast into London, but she surmised with another glance at him that he had no other plan but that. They’d snake their path into more crowded areas and hope to lose their tail somewhere along the way.

Something hit her around the middle and she felt herself knock into Bucky, both tumbling sideways to the ground as whatever had tackled her raised up. She only had a second to register the man in black combat gear before his fist connected with her face, the force behind it meant to knock her out but somehow failing to do so. Her head was reeling all the same and then the weight pressing her to the ground disappeared and she heard several more blows land off to her side. Then Bucky pulled her to her feet.

She glanced down at the man on the ground, her cheekbone aching with the movement, then caught sight of two more pursuers with guns heading towards them from the same street she’d been tackled from. Bucky tugged at her arm and then they were running again, gunshots behind them, one whizzing past her ear before they turned a corner, then another.

There was something nagging at the back of her head and she thought quickly, trying to figure out how they could have possibly wound up in this situation again. Somehow the Russian agents had cut them off twice in the last ten minutes, besides showing up at their hotel door in the first place.

As if they knew already exactly where they’d be.

“James,” she huffed. “Do you have anything – _anything_ digital on you—”

He glanced over at her quickly, nudging her to turn a corner again, before she saw his right hand graze the pocket on his jeans and suddenly she didn’t need his answer. But there was no way Steve could have been that shortsighted—

“It’s the phone—” she gasped. Another bullet hit the car she passed on her left, and she pushed them to turn right onto another street. “They’re tracking the signal on the phone – here—”

He handed the phone to her quickly and she scrambled to turn it off – in any other situation she would have thrown it away but they’d have no other way to reach Steve without it. Before she could hit the right buttons she heard the crack of a gun and a metallic clang as Bucky’s arm moved back across her shoulder blades, the bullet ricocheting somewhere behind her and barely missing her feet. There was hardly even time to register that she’d nearly just taken a bullet to the spine before they turned slightly onto a neighborhood street. She noted absently that the street sign read “Buchanan Gardens” before more gunshots sounded and they began to weave through the parked cars and oncoming traffic.

She managed to turn the phone off before they turned again, and again, and as the frequency of their weaving through the streets increased she knew they were getting closer to the city. They passed a cemetery and then she could make out a highway in the distance, her lungs just then beginning to burn.

A black van swerved to a stop in front of them, and the driver leaned out and started shooting.

Bucky pushed her into a ducking position and they moved behind a car parked on the side of the road, and with a sickening feeling she heard the doors of the van open up and more gunmen clamber out.

He was pressed against the car, head tilted as if listening for them to come closer, and at her warning glance he leaned towards her and muttered, “Stay here.”

Before she could protest she heard the crunch of a boot behind her and to the left, stepping from around the car, and then Bucky was standing. His right hand grabbed the barrel of the gun and pushed it away from his body as his left punched the man across the face. In an instant he ducked back down behind the car, on Sera’s other side now, the man’s assault rifle in his hands as he checked its ammo. In another instant he stood again and began firing.

They were surrounded on almost every side from what she could hear of the yelling all around the street. She crouched over the unconscious man by the car and patted him down looking for a gun, anything she could use. She pulled the PL-14 pistol from his hip and pocketed the combat knife she found strapped to his thigh, then peeked over the hood of the car, locating Bucky pulling another rifle from a man behind the van, his body rigid and almost shaky.

She aimed at the man on the other side of the van and shot, hitting him in the neck before he fell to the ground and she ducked behind the car again. There were voices behind her and she crawled to the other end of the car. She looked again, ducked down as gunshots rang out, then rose up to shoot at the men who’d seen her as they reloaded.

There was a slight choking feeling as someone grabbed the back of her collar mid-shot, and she fell onto her back. They grabbed her hand that held the pistol and when there was no pain, she looked up and saw Bucky crouching over her. “What the hell—” she started but then he stood suddenly to land a few shots at the men down the street, and before he crouched down again she noticed the shattered window her ribs had been leaning on when she’d been shooting. He must have pulled her down out of the way of a shot she hadn’t seen coming.

When he was down again he lifted her shoulders off the ground and helped her back into a crouch, another gunshot shattering the back window of the car. He held up one finger, then pointed somewhere behind her and she nodded. She turned on her heel, waited for the shooting to pause, then rose, aimed, and shot the man across the street just above his left eye – she’d been aiming for his right but she thanked her stars the shot landed anyways.

She felt Bucky tug at her shoulder and then they were running again, at least armed this time. They turned on Ilbert, Third, then onto the A404 along a stream towards Westway, and she heard sirens somewhere in the distance behind them.

They were running still for a while before it seemed there was no more shouting or gunshots behind them, and Bucky pulled her down an alleyway towards the water before they slowed down. It wasn’t quite 6am yet but there had been enough civilians out that must have seen them running, probably saw the guns in their hands, and she tucked her pistol into her jeans as they rested next to a rose bush. Bucky packed the assault rifle into his backpack.

They started walking along the water for a ways before it hit the Westway, and then they crossed towards the Westbourne Park Subway Station.

“You think they tracked the phone?” Bucky asked quietly then, and she nodded breathlessly. “…We took down nine of them but there could be more.”

“The phone is an old enough model,” she said between catching her breath. “That had to be the signal they were tracking, so as long we don’t use it they shouldn’t be able to do it again. Somehow, though, we’ll need to hear from Rogers.”

They made it to the station and paid out on the ticket machines to head toward Stratford on the other side of the city. As they waited for the tube to arrive, she realized how tense he was beside her and looked up at him. His eyes were locked onto the ground, jaw set, and she resisted to urge to reach for him.

“You alright?” she said quietly.

He swallowed with some difficulty but otherwise was completely still. “…The man behind the van,” he said after a long moment, “…he’d started saying…”

“…Saying what?” she prompted, the anxiety rising in her gut at the look on his face.

His hands clenched into fists crossed over his chest. “…There are these words, in Russian… this sequence…” he said. “…He’d started the sequence before I shot him.”

She felt her heart drop into her stomach.  Though she knew the answer, she asked with a shaky hand on his arm, “James, what sequence?”

He looked down at her hand and stared, unseeing for a second before he gritted his teeth and forced himself to focus. “The red one,” he said, then shook his head slightly. “The red book. From…”

The subway began to pull in but her eyes were locked on his face. “He had the book?”

He shook his head. “He was reciting it.” A bitter, humorless smirk graced his features that wavered into a grimace. “I don’t think he remembered the whole thing. He was stumbling over the next word when I shot him.”

She felt frozen to the pavement, her mind reeling too fast for her to keep up. After another moment she felt him move his arm behind her, her hand falling away, and then he was guiding her onto the subway car, into a seat in the corner.

He didn’t have the book, but he’d known the sequence, at least part of it – the string of words that activated something in Bucky’s head, that turned him into the Winter Soldier. Not Pierce’s Winter Soldier, tortured and wiped to compliance, but the Red Room’s: emptied, brainwashed, activated at a password like a machine – the perfect, infallible assassin. When they’d given her reign to research the Soldier, in their eyes for her to figure out how best to control him for the upcoming string of missions, there was one red book buried in the boxes they’d taken from the Red Room. Once she’d had it translated, she thought it was unique – the _one_ book with the sequence that could flip the switch – and she’d stolen it and burnt it to ashes.

But that was six years ago. If this random Russian agent had started to learn the sequence, still shaky enough on the order that he was stumbling over his words, then there was another out there. There had to be – or else someone who’d had it memorized, some leftover remnant of the Russian operations that had passed it on to newer agents.

She looked over at Bucky. Even if he had no idea that she’d tried to destroy the book, he seemed to be on the same train of thought she was: there were forces still out there that could take over his mind with a simple string of words, a sequence he’d tried to leave forgotten for hope that it would never come up again. And it was clear to her then what she’d have to do, if she could figure it out. There had to be a way to undo the programming.

And she had to figure it out before they had a chance to use it on him again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapter! But this seemed like the best place to end it -- I'm sure by now you've all realized I love a good cliffhanger.


	10. Something Hungry, Something That Forgets—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, sorry for the unexpected hiatus. Life has been catching up with me, but stay with it! I'm not finished with this story in the least.

They rode the subway on a winding route throughout the city for a couple of hours, stopping once to turn on Bucky’s phone and make sure Steve hadn’t tried to contact them. Sera attempted to call him once but the call didn’t go through and she turned the phone back off in defeat. If their pursuers tracked the call at least they’d track it to the wrong part of London, as the subway took them back to Stratford.

The day was long, and after breakfast in a nondescript café, they found themselves in a library where Sera couldn’t help but nap at their table for a few hours in the quiet. Both of them were so wrought with anxiety, constantly looking over their shoulders after leaving the library, that even over lunch conversation was sparse and clipped. They took the subway around the city again so they could try the phone somewhere back near Wembley, but with no notifications and no luck calling, they headed back west and holed up silently in another café until dinnertime.

They ate at the café, took the subway one more time to try the phone, and then decided to buy a room at the Stratford Hotel for the night. The money Steve had wired her was running low after she paid for the hotel, but it was at least a state she was used to being in after the last two years, and she knew they’d be able to get by penniless between both of their sets of experience.

As for the rest of what their experience had taught them, the only securities they could take against their possible pursuers were to use fake names in registering the room, locking the door behind them and propping a chair against the doorknob, and Bucky telling her in no uncertain terms that he’d be watching the window and listening for disturbances the whole night. She offered him first dibs on the shower in an attempt to give him a chance to relax before he took his self-assumed watch, and silently she added _Get him to sleep more_ to her list of things to do to help re-stabilize him (once they weren’t on the run from Russian operatives, of course.)

When Bucky came out of the shower, toweling his hair off as he walked across the room, he glanced disapprovingly at her perch on the single bed closest to the door. The room they’d taken was oriented the same way as the last, with a desk by the window and the bathroom next to the door, only they hadn’t had a two-single room available so she’d had to take one with a single and a double bed. The beds were further apart and the room wasn’t as claustrophobically small, but the walls were a Pepto Bismol pink that only served to remind Sera of fits of nausea.

“Take the double,” Bucky told her as he finished with the towel.

She looked up at him from where she’d been re-lacing her boots. “I figured you’d be more comfortable in the double,” she said, “since—”

“I told you I’m not sleeping,” he said simply, moving the second chair around to the side of the desk closest to the double bed. “…Besides, you need to be near the window in case we have to escape again.”

She sighed softly and figured she couldn’t argue with him. Instead, she headed to the shower herself and thanked him in her head for leaving enough of the complimentary shampoo and conditioner for her to use. Small comforts.

When she entered the room again, she placed the makeshift wrist wrap he’d given her on the single bed, rolling her wrist to stretch out the tendons and resisting the urge to rub at her scars. There was some slight bruising around them that gave her wrist a strange, mottled coloring between the pale of the scars and the purple and blue of the injury, and she caught him staring at it after she’d glimpsed it herself.

“It looks worse than it is,” she assured him. “There’s no more pain than there usually is.”

“I’d grabbed it again, earlier,” he said, “when I pushed you out of the way of that shot. I’d forgotten it was there.”

She sat down on the edge of the double. “Honestly, so had I,” she said. “From what I remember you’d grabbed me pretty gently anyways.”

He glanced away from her wrist and ruffled the back of his hair idly, then changed the subject. “So… ‘Serafima,’ huh?” His eyes moved to hers from beneath the strands of wet hair falling into his face.

She blushed slightly, though she wasn’t sure why, and nodded.

He smirked a little with his hand still tangled in his hair, elbow resting on the back of the chair. “I tried what you suggested,” he said, “to imagine the sound of it in your voice. A lot of it’s fuzzy, but I remember wondering what kind of name that was. I think I must’ve known, but…”

“You never asked,” she said, and struggled not to say more about the memory he didn’t yet share.

He nodded slowly. She watched the concentration flit across his eyes, his lips pursing and relaxing, noted dimly how dark his stubble was becoming since she’d first found him. His mouth formed a smirk then and she realized she’d been staring. “It sounds Russian, actually,” he said, the smirk faltering ever so slightly.

“It is,” she said. “That and my middle name are both Russian, but my last name is Catalan.”

He snorted at the odd mix and she couldn’t help but laugh a little with him. “Do you speak Russian and Catalan?”

“Not at all,” she said, “though I’m starting to think Russian would have come in handy.” He chuckled bitterly and raised his brows in agreement. “…My parents both worked at the UN as translators – my mother was from Moscow and my dad from Barcelona, but they both spoke English. They met on the job and moved to America after they were married.”

“…You were born in Brooklyn,” he said, brow furrowing.

She felt her heart beat a little harder as she watched the recognition pass over his face. “Yes. Same hospital, I think, that Captain Rogers was born in.”

He couldn’t help but chuckle despite the confusion in his head. “Just seventy years later,” he amended.

“Sixty-nine, actually,” she laughed. “But I’ll gladly take that year off my age.”

He huffed a short laugh and shook his head, rubbing at his temples. “…You told me that, didn’t you? Where you were born?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I did.”

He closed his eyes. “When…” he started, then paused. The crease in his brow only deepened. “You were whispering. Sitting off to the side, talking to me. …Your hair was braided.”

She stayed silent though her heart was beating heavily, and idly she wondered how much more strain it could take after the last few days.

“It was the day after… after you’d told me we couldn’t talk about that stuff,” he said, and her breath caught in her throat. “’Cause if they found out…” He stopped, and ran his hand over his face. After a deep breath, his eyes opened again and found hers, and he looked just as tired as he must have felt.

She could imagine the punishments his mind had conjured that he’d shut down, and she couldn’t blame him. Someday he’d be able to remember without it being so trying. She tried to soften her tense expression. “…Is it cathartic at all? Remembering?”

He leaned back in the chair, his shoulder resting on the wall, and regarded her heavily-lidded eyes that made her simultaneously sad and fluttery. “Sometimes,” he said. “But sometimes it’s like electricity.”

“Painful, you mean?”

He chuckled bitterly. “Sure, I guess it’s painful most of the time,” he said. “But I meant… energizing, I guess. Most of the time it’s a mix of the three.”

She nodded, and shortly after decided to go to bed.

* * *

Sera dreamt of a faceless man with shaking hands. She pulled him out of a fire and asked him what the ashes tasted like, and when he grabbed her wrist she felt the familiar, grounding ache but with that same wrist she pulled him up anyways. Something about his facelessness told her a man had done this to him. He looked hungry, hungrier than she’d ever felt in her life, and the fire behind him turned into an ocean, the ground beneath them to something metallic, something moving. It was storming hard and the ship carried her backwards, and the air got colder and colder and the more the temperature dropped the more her joints ached.

There was a voice in the thunder of the dream but it rumbled away. She turned around and the faceless man had disappeared, and she called out to him but then her right hand was shaking, like his had been. She spoke to the rain instead, knowing somehow the man would hear her, but knowing also that she was talking to two men at once, and her parents, and her younger sister whose face had also been erased. “I don’t know any better,” she told him, told her, “than to not let the storm stop,” and she meant to say that it’s because the water helps the ship move, but then the shaking in her hand had moved all the way up her arm to her throat and she could no longer speak.

There was no moonlight in the room when she woke up, just darkness. Even after her eyes adjusted she could only barely make out the glint of Bucky’s metallic arm, and it was then that she realized his arm was shaking hers, trying to wake her. When she sat up, he stopped touching her, and that’s when she heard a distant voice, low and gruff. She froze in the bed, feeling sick from the dream and suddenly very, very anxious, and stared up at where she thought Bucky’s face was in the darkness.

Then he was speaking. “You’re awake?” he asked.

“What’s going on?” she whispered. “I heard a voice—”

“It’s some man in the next room, I heard him when I came back in—”

“Came back? What—where did you go? What’s going on?”

“Sera, calm down,” he said, and some small hysterical part of her wanted to laugh that the words were coming from him. “I went out on the subway and tried Steve again. He answered this time, said he tried calling an hour ago. Said it’s time to move.”

“Are they still trying to track us?”

He paused. “Probably. But they’re not a problem, I don’t think. He said he hadn’t heard anything.”

“So they’re not after us? They’re not here in the hotel again?”

“I—no? No, I don’t think so.”

“Then why are all the lights off?”

“I… I couldn’t find the switch.”

She stilled for a beat, listening to the near-silence of his breath, before she ran a hand over her eyes and reached for the lamp next to the bed. When the room flooded with yellow light she turned back to him and frowned. “So what did he say, exactly?”

“Something went wrong on the mission, apparently,” Bucky said, and absently she wondered how he’d gotten dressed so well in the dark before she remembered he’d never gone to bed in the first place. “He said he has to fly back with his team and that he’ll have to meet us in New York.”

“And he really thinks it’s safe for us to risk getting on a plane? What if some of those Russian agents board with us?”

“He said he arranged a flight for us with some of his contacts planted to protect us – that the pilot is an ex-SHIELD agent,” he explained. “But the flight leaves in less than an hour so we need to go.”

She brushed a hand through her hair, cursing herself for not braiding it the night before. “Alright, just – just turn around or something so I can find my pants,” she muttered anxiously.

She caught the look of realization on his face before he complied, walking over to his backpack and repacking their extra clothes with his back to her. She pulled her jeans on and then grabbed her flannel out of his hand before he could pack it. He turned to look at her with a strange look on his face but then she was too busy pulling her flannel, jacket, and boots on.

“I suppose we’ll have to lose the guns somewhere on the way to the airport,” she said as she tied her boots.

Bucky made a noncommittal noise, and then they left, dropping the two guns and the knife they’d taken into a dumpster back behind the hotel. The London City Airport was fairly close, but they took a taxi nonetheless after waiting a good five minutes to find one as it was nearly 5:30 in the morning. Sunrise wasn’t for another hour but in the twilight at least they had enough cover of darkness to look nondescript.

She glanced over at him in the cab, her gaze falling on the distracted look on his face where she had expected his usual look of stress, or maybe one of exhaustion. “Everything alright?” she asked him quietly.

He glanced at her briefly before turning back to gaze out the front windshield.

“…You seem off.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, and his fingers began to tap idly on his leg. “Just…” He seemed to change his mind. “You said my name in your sleep, when I came back in.”

She felt her cheeks flush, and thought back on what she could remember of her dream. The ship, the storm, the shaking. “Did I?”

He nodded. “It wasn’t… you just sounded like you were calling for me,” he said hesitantly. “I’d thought you were awake but you weren’t.”

She looked back over at him and somehow she knew that wasn’t what he’d been thinking about – his gaze still seemed distracted, as if even in recalling her voice calling for him in her sleep, his mind was still somewhere else, paying equal focus to each. There was no use pushing it though, and she didn’t reply as they arrived at the airport.

Steve had reserved their tickets already, and they picked them up at the front desk from a kind young lady who looked like she desperately craved a cup of coffee. Sera looked over the tickets to confirm their information as she checked them in, and dimly she heard the lady ask if his backpack was a carry-on. The names on the tickets were Sarah Brandt – the name she’d told Steve, and luckily she still had an ID that matched it – and Steven Rogers, and she hoped Bucky wouldn’t need an ID to board.

The lady had some trouble with her printer as she was trying to get them their boarding passes, and Sera continued to look over the tickets while they waited. Then she noticed the date printed on them – March 10th, 2016. She looked over at Bucky when she realized why she remembered that date.

He met her slightly widened stare with a passive look of confusion, then looked over her shoulder at the tickets to figure out what she’d seen.

“It’s your birthday?” she whispered hesitantly.

He leaned away slowly, meeting her gaze for only a moment before he looked down and nodded in a small motion. He looked around at the airport then as if trying to communicate that it didn’t bother him, but she could imagine the truth – no wonder he’d seemed so distracted.

“Here you are, ma’am,” said the lady behind the counter, then told them which gate to be at. “They should be boarding soon so go ahead and pop through security.”

She thanked her hazily and the two walked towards security.

“James… are you—?”

“Sera, this might be a problem.”

She looked up at him, then followed his gaze over to the metal detectors. “Oh, shit,” she muttered. It’d been such a long time since she’d flown that she’d forgotten all about them. “Here, I’ll explain it to them for you, but you gotta play along and you gotta stop looking so skittish about it.”

Bucky gave her a withering look, but then she was holding his arm around the elbow and his cheeks went slightly pink as they approached the security officers – who, frankly, also looked like they really wanted a cup of coffee.

She walked up to the kindest-looking one, an older man rounder about the middle. “Excuse me, sir,” she said sheepishly, “but my husband here – he has a prosthetic and I’m worried about him setting off your detectors.” She lowered her voice slightly. “It’s just – he doesn’t need the attention, you know?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the officer said. “We’ll just have to screen him, but go ahead and move through the detectors.” He noticed the blush on Bucky’s face and stood from his stool. “Here, I can do the screening myself so you don’t have to worry. Just go on through and I’ll check on the other side. Place your bag in the bin, please.”

Bucky did as he asked and followed Sera through the metal detector, cringing as it started beeping at him. The officer met him on the other side and asked him to show him the “prosthetic.” Sera grabbed his backpack for him and watched from the side with a worried but almost embarrassed look on her face.

The officer seemed sympathetic, until Bucky took off his glove and pulled his sleeve up a little. Then his face was one of shock, and the beginnings of fear. “That’s – well—” He looked over at Sera once he could tear his eyes away and she hoped the honest, empathetic concern showed on her features.

“It’s a newer sort of prosthetic they’re doing now,” she said. “A nice doctor in New York set him up with it – cost a pretty penny, too, but you can see why – and it just goes all the way up to here, sir,” and she showed the officer by pointing to her own shoulder, “and it’s, you know, it’s sort of stiff to move, but…” Inwardly she hoped the rambling was helping more than hurting, but she had to admit her acting skills were rusty. As long as this was the most attention Bucky drew to himself, it didn’t matter.

The officer seemed to almost not know what to do, and he put a hand on his hip and turned back to stare at the metal hand, then up at Bucky’s face which Sera was glad to see still blushing rather than seething. After a tense moment the man huffed a little and stepped to the side. “Well, sir, I’ve never seen anything like that, but I imagine you’re well lucky to have had an American doctor to fix you up,” he said. “God knows you’d never see anything like that in England. Well, go on, then. Have a good flight.”

Sera took his arm again after she thanked the officer, leaning into him until they were out of the officer’s view heading towards their gate. She moved away then and gave him space, handing his backpack over to him which he took almost relieved.

“Why use the husband thing?” he muttered.

“Always makes people more understanding when one of us acts so concerned over the other,” she said. “That wasn’t the best I’ve ever done but I’d totally forgotten to worry about airport security.”

The plane was boarding when they reached the gate, and they found their seats quickly towards the front of the plane. As they settled in she found her thoughts falling back on the date – she’d never mentioned his birthday to him while she was working for HYDRA, naturally, and nearly every time the date rolled around he was in cryo anyways. But it had always occurred to her, every year, and she’d count his age bitterly. She could only imagine what the date made him think of. Optimistically she hoped it made him remember happier birthdays, before the war.

She looked over at him in the aisle seat, the set of his jaw and the unfocused look in his blue eyes.

He surprised her by speaking, and she thought he must have known she’d still be preoccupied about the subject. “…I was born ninety-nine years ago,” he said quietly, but kept his gaze on the seat in front of him.

She wasn’t sure what to say to that. After a moment, she settled on saying, “Well, I guess it’s sort of fitting then that you’re flying back home today.”

The corners of his mouth twisted into a bitter smile, the natural pout of his lips only serving to make the look sadder than he probably felt. He sighed as if to breathe the tension out and turned the smile towards her. His eyes were clear. “I wouldn’t call it home,” he said. “I don’t have one anymore. …But – yeah. I suppose I’ve had worse birthdays.”

She matched his bittersweet smile and looked down at her hands. After a moment, she told him, “I spent mine last year in an old widow’s house in Romania. She was travelling and never knew I was there. But someone came by to water the plants for her and I had to escape through the window and hide on the roof. I was up there for three hours when he stayed to take advantage of her dusty liquor cabinet.”

Bucky laughed. “I lived in Romania last year, in an apartment in the city,” he said, and then his eyes glinted mischievously. “You know, that mighta been me that came and drank out her liquor cabinet.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Given that I’d been looking for _you_ the whole time, I doubt I would’ve missed that.”

His smile was bittersweet again, and then it faded slightly. “How long were you looking for me?”

Her mouth twisted. “About as long as Rogers has been, I’d bet,” she said. “As soon as I found out you’d escaped, too, I went looking. It got easier once the people after me turned their attention to you and him.”

“…Why?”

She caught his gaze. “What do you mean?”

“Why did you bother trying to find me?” he asked.

“I told you, I wanted you help you. It wasn’t hard to figure out you needed it.”

The pilot came over the intercom then as a flight attendant stood at the front of the plane, demonstrating the air masks on cue with the pilot’s short monologue.

“Most physicians don’t care enough about their patients to go looking for them when they run away,” Bucky said, leaning towards her so she could hear him over the pilot’s voice. “It’s been _two years_ since I went into hiding. That’s…” He shook his head lightly.

Sera couldn’t meet his eyes. She waited for the pilot to finish speaking and then fastened her seat belt when prompted, trying to put together the right words without making him feel… awkward? Creeped out? She barely knew how to explain to herself her dedication, let alone the man she’d been set to save since SHIELD fell.

“I…” she said, then twisted her hands in her sleeves, her arms crossed over her belly. She decided to say it as simply as possible. “I care about you.”

Bucky was still beside her, still slightly leaning into her space. She saw his fingers tighten on his arm out of the corner of her eyes but she couldn’t bring herself to find out what expression he was making.

“I think it’ll make sense to you when you remember more,” she said, “but that’s the best way I can explain it.… I… I failed you, when you most needed me. I got myself caught and I ran. And I should have done more to help you, knowing everything they were doing to you, so it’s the least I can do to repay my absence by doing what I can now, now that you’re here.” She smiled slightly, more to relieve the tension she felt than anything else. “But. Bottom line is I care about you too much, and you deserve better than what they did to you.”

He was silent when she finished, and she could feel the heat of his arm near hers. The plane started to move but she didn’t look out the window, merely stared down at her boots and tried not to think about how strange the situation must have been for him. He hardly knew her, and yet she cared about him deeply enough to search for him for two years instead of just starting her life over somewhere safe and quiet. The longer the silence drew on, the more sure she was that he likely wanted to be anywhere else than where he was.

Then she felt him shift in his seat, and she felt his hand brush her shoulder as he moved it to the other side of her head, his fingers burying themselves in her hair. Before she could look to see what he was doing, he was pulling her head towards him slightly and moving forward himself. She felt her heart swim.

His lips pressed against her hair, just above her ear, in a sweet, chaste kiss. Then he retreated, his hand untangling from her hair and returning to the arm rest, his body facing forward, but she could still feel his eyes on her. She turned to him.

He didn’t smile, or make any particular expression, but his eyes alone spoke volumes enough. She merely matched his gaze for a moment, her cheeks warming and her head tingling where he’d kissed her.

Until he remembered her that was all he could offer her, and she understood that. But there was something else in his gaze that told her that even without the memories, what little he knew of her now more than deserved what little he could give her. She wondered what he’d seen in her to warrant such a reaction.

The plane took off, and Bucky spent most of the eight hour flight writing.


	11. At the Expense of Innocence

It was Sam Wilson that had called, not Steve, when Bucky handed the phone to Sera after they stepped off the plane in New York. The small airport was somewhere northwest of New York City in a quieter part of the state by the Hudson River, and though the airport wasn’t crowded, the crowd they did exit with was disorienting after eight still hours on a plane.

“Agent Brandt,” Sam said as soon as she accepted the call. “I haven’t had nearly enough sleep to wait patiently any longer, so if you wouldn’t mind and look over to your right?”

She did as he asked, and made out his tall figure in a pair of sunglasses through the moving people, holding up a sign that merely said _Icicle_. “Icicle?” she asked as she led Bucky over to the man, but he had already hung up the phone. She raised an eyebrow at the sign when they reached him.

“That’s for him,” he said simply, jerking his head in Bucky’s direction before folding the sign up and throwing it in the nearest trash can as they made their way out of the airport. She glanced up at Bucky but the expression on his face told her he’d likely expected as much from the Falcon. “Cap’s busy diffusing a metaphorical bomb back at the compound right now so I’m gonna take you guys to where you’ll be staying.”

They walked out into the sunlight and she tugged her worn leather jacket tighter around her. “Not at the compound, then?” she asked, slightly relieved.

“No,” Sam laughed. “Situation’s a bit messy right now so you’re staying in my old apartment until we can figure out what to do about Icicle over there.”

“So back into hiding?” Bucky said from behind her.

“What? You should be used to it by now,” Sam quipped. He pulled his keys out of his pocket as they approached a sleek black Cadillac. He went around and opened the passenger side door for Sera, leaving the back seat for Bucky before he climbed in the driver’s side.

“No one else on the team even knows we found him,” he told Sera. “Steve’s been looking for the right time to bring it up, but after what just happened, I kinda doubt there’s ever gonna be a good opportunity. We’ll just have to see.”

Her mouth twisted as the car began to move. She’d be lying to herself if she said she hadn’t expected this – after everything the Winter Soldier had done, it was never going to be easy to get Bucky off the hook. She only hoped this didn’t lead where she knew it likely would. “…Where is this apartment?” she asked instead.

“In Newburgh,” he said. “It’s right here by the airport. Steve set it up when we were getting close in Italy – figured our man would need somewhere to stay if something went wrong. Not sure harboring a wanted criminal is gonna look too good on the Avengers if any of this gets out but… You gotta give him credit for his foresight.”

Sera couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s judgment. He jerked his head towards the backseat, not towards where Bucky sat behind him but at a bag on the other side. “He set you guys up with some necessities, too,” he said, before he turned to glance at Sera over the top of his sunglasses. “He didn’t foresee you coming along, though, so I think it’s mostly guy products. But there’s a laptop and stuff in there, too.”

“You didn’t happen to bring the bag I’d had with me in Leipzig, did you?” she asked him, remembering suddenly.

He shook his head. “We lost a lot of our stuff in Germany. Got ambushed a couple times. I’m afraid your bag didn’t make it.”

Her mouth twisted slightly but she nodded and turned her eyes to the road.

It was a short drive, and the apartment complex overlooked the Hudson. He parked in front of the apartment they’d be occupying, throwing the keys back at Bucky who immediately took his bags and headed inside. Sera had undone her seatbelt and opened her door halfway before Sam spoke.

“I did some research,” he said, taking off his sunglasses before he turned the car off. “And you know, there’s not much about ‘Sarah Brandt’ in the systems.”

Her hand was frozen on the door handle.

“A lot about what you did for SHIELD – not a lot about where you came from.”

She decidedly didn’t respond. He looked over at her, but where she’d expected to see anger or suspicion, she only saw a sort of kindness.

“I don’t know what HYDRA had you doing,” he continued, “and I probably don’t wanna know. But… I did find what happened to your sister.”

_Oh_ , she thought simply. Her hand slipped from the door handle.

“It’s not anything I have experience with, losing family like that. Especially like that. But I’ve lost people, too.” He seemed to regret bringing it up the longer he watched her expression. “Just wanted to say I’m sorry you went through that.”

She swallowed, and looked forward at the apartment, where Bucky had left the front door open. Through the window she saw him glance up at them. “…They hadn’t handed me over to HYDRA yet,” she said quietly. “It was a mission for SHIELD. One of the few times they ever asked me to assassinate a target.” She watched as Bucky moved around in what she assumed was their kitchen, making himself busy while not-so-subtly keeping an eye on what was keeping them in the car. “He was a former Red Room agent, trying to steal intel from SHIELD and likely HYDRA, too. …But he had family, same as anyone.”

“Family that took their revenge out on _your_ family,” Sam said in a valiant attempt at comfort.

“It was an accident,” she said. “He was coming after me and got mixed up. Didn’t even know what his brother had been involved in.” She shook her head and opened the door fully. “It’s in the past now, anyways. …But thank you for your condolences.”

“Look,” he said, and she paused again. “I don’t know what Cap thinks about you, but as far as I see it, you’re in this with us now. Everyone on this team has lost people. Steve probably more than anyone, which is why I get how much Barnes means to him, even if I don’t agree with the shit that dude’s caused. …I didn’t mean to bring up any harsh memories. Just that, no matter who you are or what you’re probably hiding—” she glanced away for a second, mouth twisting “—I get you.”

She watched him for a moment before she smiled. “I think I understand what you’re saying,” she said. “…Thank you.”

Sam nodded once, and then followed her out of the car into the apartment.

Bucky had vacated the kitchen to her right by then, and she saw a half-drunk glass of water on the counter. There was movement somewhere down the hallway that branched from between the kitchen and living area. On her left was a small laundry room with a slated, sliding door, and beyond that on the left was what looked to be a reading area offset slightly from the living room.

“It’s two bedroom, one bath,” Sam said behind her, leaning in the doorway. “Nothing too fancy but it was comfortable when I lived here.”

She nodded absently and wandered forward, peering to her right down the hallway just as a door closed. Turning back to Sam, she said, “Thank you for this. It feels secluded enough.”

“Don’t thank me,” he replied. “It’s all Cap. I just hooked him up with the location.” He pointed into various corners of the apartment near the ceiling, where several discreet boxes were fixated. “It’s secure too – those sensors will tell us how many people are in the apartment, and whether they match you guys’ specs. There are some of our contacts living in the complex too, keeping an eye out for us. Should be set.”

Before she could thank him again, there was muffled music playing from Sam’s direction. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and answered the call, turning away from Sera.

“Wilson. …The hell do you mean ‘the Secretary of State’? …Yeah, alright. They’re set up so I’m on my way. …Yeah, great, this will be fun.” He ended the call, shaking his head, and turned back to Sera hastily.

“Looks like I’ve gotta make a meeting,” he said. He found the bag Steve had set them up with open by the half wall that divided the kitchen from the entryway and nodded to it. “There’s a phone in there for you. Standard issue for non-Avengers personnel at the Compound, untraceable, untrackable by anyone but us. My number and Steve’s are programmed in it already, and probably Barnes’ temporary, so anything happens? Either of you can contact us.”

“Got it,” she said. “Thank you, Wilson.”

He was already out the door, heading back to his car. “It’s Sam!” he called over his shoulder, and she smiled slightly as she waved him off.

Once she shut the front door and turned the deadbolt, she went to the duffel bag and searched through it for the phone he mentioned. She found the laptop first, removing it and setting it on the kitchen table, then pulled the phone out and turned it on. Idly she wondered about everything he’d mentioned – whatever had gone wrong on Steve’s mission in West Africa seemed to have been serious enough that they were meeting with the Secretary of State, and that level of government intervention didn’t bode well for what Steve wanted for Bucky’s future. Again she had the feeling that she should have expected this, and she began to wonder if going along with Steve’s orders had really been the best thing for Bucky.

She heard the door down the hall open as she stared at the three contacts programmed into the phone. At least Sam seemed to trust her, even if Steve was still wary as Sam had implied – and Bucky seemed to trust her as well. As much as she didn’t anticipate hiding out indefinitely in an area with which she was unfamiliar, there was support enough that they’d be safer here than all the places she’d been in Europe, with and without Bucky. And that much boded well for starting Bucky on the road to recovering what he still lacked.

“I put your clothes in the other bedroom.”

She looked up. Bucky was leaning a hip against the kitchen table, arms crossed. He’d changed clothes into some of what Steve must have left for him: a simple, black, long-sleeved scoop-neck and a well-fit pair of jeans, his boots still on but the laces loosened.

She stood from where she’d crouched next to the bag and tucked the phone in her back pocket. “You alright?” she asked. “You ran inside pretty quickly…”

“Wilson doesn’t like me,” he said simply. “…I figured if he had anything else to tell us he’d rather talk to you.”

She nodded, smirking slightly at the odd rivalry. “Well, he didn’t say much else. Apartment is secured, Steve gave us an untraceable phone…” she said. “Then he left on call – sounds like the Secretary of State wants to meet with the Avengers about something.”

His brow furrowed slightly, processing what that meant, before he nodded. He stood awkwardly for a moment, looking around at the white walls and dark hardwood floors, the plush off-white rugs in the living room and hallway. “…That’s not all he said to you.”

She walked around the half wall and leaned back on the kitchen counter to face him, but couldn’t think of how to reply. The thoughts from the car resurfaced and she swallowed them down.

“You seemed upset,” he said quieter, as if to explain his bringing it up. “…Over whatever he told you in the car.”

She smiled sadly. His concern was appreciated, more than she could fathom herself, but this wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have twice in one day. “…He read something in my file,” she said, matching his volume. “Something I’d mentioned to you… before. It’s nothing to worry about, though. He was just expressing his sympathy.”

His gaze was unreadable but he didn’t press the subject. After a moment his brow furrowed in concentration, and he turned away, looking around as if to distract himself. His eyes fell on the laptop. “…He mention what’s on this?”

She walked forward and shook her head. “No, but I figure Rogers just didn’t want you to feel so cut off from the world. It’s probably as secured as the phone is, so I don’t know how good the internet connection will be, but between that and the TV—” she nodded towards where it stood in the living room beyond the couch, “—we’ll be able to stay informed.”

He mussed his hair up in the back thoughtfully, then smoothed it back down as he walked away from the computer towards the television.

As he messed with the remote and the television clicked on, she walked back into the kitchen and took stock of what they’d been provided with. The channels slipped from one to another behind her as she noted the week’s worth of food in the fridge and pantry, the limited but versatile set of dishes, the water filter attached to the faucet over the sink.

He’d settled on the news after a few more moments, and Sera only half-listened as she took the duffel bag down the hall, peering into a bedroom on the left with a small stack of her clothes on the double bed, the bathroom right next to it, and the other bedroom across from them with Bucky’s dirty clothes strewn across his bed and his backpack propped up by the nightstand. She left the duffel bag inside the door of his room.

“… _king went on to say that support for Nigeria from Wakanda is forthcoming in light of this tragedy, and that he expects the American government to do the same. We now turn to…_ ”

Sera frowned as she walked back into the living room, a bad feeling in her gut about what story they were really reporting on. She sat on the arm of the couch, a foot away from where Bucky was leaning forward over his knees, frowning at the screen.

“ _…wonder what legal authority does an ‘enhanced’ individual like Wanda Maximoff have to operate in Nigeria? This confrontation in Lagos only raises more questions about the Avengers’ methods, and government officials of now dozens of countries around the world are expressing concern for these obviously dangerous individuals recruited to the Avengers after the disaster in Sokovia last year…”_

They replayed citizen footage of the city lifting into the air in Sokovia, the buildings falling off the edges and the panic of the evacuees, then cut to the more recent footage of what had to be Nigeria, a shot of Captain Rogers in full gear staring up in near horror at something off-camera before speaking into his earpiece. The footage of the aftermath of an explosion on the side of a building then showed side by side with the man speaking over the event.

_“…and my fellow political scientists and I are asking whether the American government can continue to allow_ any _members of this group to operate without some form of government oversight…”_

“…I’m not sure this is what Steve meant by staying informed,” Bucky muttered. She looked down at him. His frown had faded somewhat but she thought she detected sadness in his eyes as they remained glued to the screen, and she found she didn’t want to look back at it.

“Better this way than making him relive it, I imagine,” she said quietly, and forced herself to look back at the news even as Bucky glanced up at her.

She took the phone out of her back pocket without taking her eyes from the footage and handed it down to him. “Here. I have a feeling he’ll want to meet up with you whenever he gets out of that meeting, and he won’t want to talk to _me_. ”

A familiar name pulled them both back to the report as Bucky took the phone from her.

“… _as it appears they were able to stop former SHIELD agent Brock Rumlow, revealed after the Triskelion incident to be a HYDRA planted terrorist, from a bio-attack on the city of Lagos. Mr. Theriault, I would argue that’s…_ ”

She glanced over at Bucky, his fists clenching and unclenching where they hung over his knees, and she couldn’t help the tightening of her jaw. Another HYDRA agent down, but if she wasn’t mistaken from what her old contacts had updated her with over the last few years, Rumlow’s death made Sera the last living agent involved in the Winter Soldier project under HYDRA. There was no doubt Bucky remembered Rumlow’s involvement, but also no way he realized what exactly this meant.

She wondered how the rest of Steve’s team would react to her criminalizing involvement with the Winter Soldier.

And whether the target on her back had now doubled in size.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Sorry again for the long delay: this semester is going to be a busy one so expect updates to be fairly sporadic. I still have two chapters after this that only need editing, and another halfway finished, so no worries about the story being abandoned -- it's not!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! Don't forget to leave your thoughts in a review <3


	12. Rinse and Repeat

“But they don’t believe there’s any accountability without government oversight, and Tony thinks that signing these Accords will somehow save more people by shifting our accountability to a panel.”

Sera lifted her head from her hand, crossing her arms instead over the table. “So then, what? The UN is left to decide when you’re needed or not?” she deadpanned. “The Avengers are turned into the UN’s lackeys?”

Steve shook his head, his face exhausted, and leaned forward on the table. “None of this is anything I didn’t bring up with them already,” he said with finality. “The bottom line is it looks like half the team is willing to sign, and _regardless_ of who signs, the Accords will be ratified by the UN in Vienna in three days.”

Bucky remained silent through most of the discussion. Steve had come by early in the afternoon, exhausted and more somber than Sera would have expected. She couldn’t blame him – despite how relieved he must have been having Bucky back in his life, between the Lagos mission and the Accords and his worries about his best friend, there was no telling how stressed Steve must have been. All the same he knew he’d better tell Bucky, and by extension Sera, what was going on for how much it would likely affect all of them. She imagined he hadn’t expected her to be so vocal, where Bucky had uttered less than a handful of words since he’d arrived.

“Captain…” she said with a quick glance over at her companion. “I don’t know what would have happened before, but now with these Accords you must realize that there will _have_ to be a trial.”

When Steve didn’t respond, and Sera furrowed her brow at his odd silence, Bucky finally spoke up.

“…They still don’t know I’m here.”

Steve shook his head. “No, not yet,” he conceded. “There hasn’t been an opportunity to bring it up.”

“There won’t _be_ a good opportunity to tell them,” she said. “And now there’s no avoiding it. The longer you wait, the worse it’ll look on you and the rest of the team, especially in the eyes of these people calling for the Avengers’ submission.”

“I know that.”

Her grip tensed on her arms. “And you know what will happen at the trial, with things as they are,” she pushed. “The UN wants ‘enhanced individuals’ to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions – what is that going to mean for the _direct_ consequences of the Winter Soldier?”

He fixed her with a hard stare, and she felt Bucky’s eyes on her as well. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it,” Steve said firmly, and then turned his gaze to Bucky. “There’s no denying you were brainwashed, and they’ll see that. The truth of that alone is proof enough of your innocence.”

Sera looked between the both of them before her eyes settled on Bucky. He didn’t seem assured, or in any way optimistic, but rather resigned to whatever fate he was dealt – whether that involve prison or freedom or any fate in between. Her brow furrowed further.

“…You’re assuming that their idea of justice is the same as yours,” she said quieter, turning back to Steve. “But things like truth, or justice, are the hardest things to achieve in any judiciary system. Especially on such a large scale like this. There will be no justice for him with a public trial.”

“You said yourself that there will _have_ to be a trial. So what other choice do we have?”

“If he can remember exactly what they had him do, and if we can get tangible proof of what they did, then we can take it directly to the executives in charge and ask for a pardon – especially on account of his being a P.O.W. since _1945_.”

Steve leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. She could tell he was genuinely considering her course of action but ultimately he shook his head and sighed. “There’s a lot of variables that your plan depends on. I don’t know if we can risk waiting for that.”

“It’s more likely to tip in James’ favor than a public trial would be,” she said, then shifted forward in her seat. “Look, your team has done the damage it’s done by trying to save people, with incidental casualties that probably could have been avoided, but ultimately are bound to happen with the kind of enemies you’ve faced. And after all this, the Secretary of State considered you, at best, ‘vigilantes,’ who are too dangerous to go unchecked by their government. What do you think people will consider the Winter Soldier?”

“The Winter Soldier has been gone for over two years,” Steve replied slowly. “What they’ll think of _Bucky_ is something we can’t predict.”

She looked over at Bucky. He was leaning over the table still, staring unseeingly at his hands before him. He only looked up again when Steve continued.

“I will make this right,” he said, with a finality she couldn’t argue against. “Whatever it takes.”

Sera ran a hand over her forehead, forcing herself to relax resignedly. There was nothing more to be said until something gave, either politically or within Steve’s jurisdiction. And ultimately, she had to tell herself, they both wanted the same thing for Bucky: his freedom, no matter what that entailed. She just wasn’t sure how far he was willing to go to obtain it.

She stood up from the table, and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair. “I’ll give you two some time alone,” she said, knowing they probably hadn’t had a chance to truly talk since they’d found him. Not to mention she needed a reprieve from Steve’s intensity to clear her head. “I’ll be just down there by the river if you need me.”

Neither of them said a word as she left, but she hadn’t expected them to.

It was cloudy out, but not as chilly as it had been that morning. She walked around the apartment, away from where Steve’s bike was parked out front, and headed across the street to a pier behind a riverside restaurant she hadn’t expected would be there. The restaurant was dead – too late in the afternoon for lunch and too early for dinner – and she reveled in the calm by the water as she sat on the end of the pier with her hands in her jacket pockets.

She forced her mind blank, listening to the water as it sloshed gently against the pier. She couldn’t remember feeling so mentally taxed in years, but then again she couldn’t remember ever being so wrapped up in so many complicated situations at once. The past two years by themselves had been taxing just by the nature of being on the run from multiple dangerous organizations, but the past few days alone had been more eventful than the whole two years put together, and she didn’t expect things to get any easier.

There was little doubt in her mind that she could handle it. If anything, she was more worried about Bucky than she was about herself. But for now she shook those worries from her mind and fought back against the anxiety that had been rising in her all day.

In the quiet she became acutely and truly aware of how much of the last few days had been occupied by Bucky’s presence – his hesitant voice, his electric, nervous energy that faded in and out with his paranoia and stress, even the sound of his footfalls, of the quiet whirring his left arm made when he moved. And abruptly she realized, despite all the running and hiding and threat of his relapsing into the Soldier, how calming his presence had been for her. More calming even than the sounds of the river now before her. A small part of her wished he were sitting next to her on the dock.

She opened her eyes, unsure of when she’d closed them. It was dangerous territory she was treading in even feeling so at ease around Bucky. Especially considering how much she had to work with him on in the next few days to help him recover (if he consented to as much) and considering the battles, both legal and literal, she knew lay on the horizon that she would have to have a hand in. She only hoped she wasn’t fooling herself into thinking he wanted as much from her – or at the least that he would allow so much.

Yet she found it impossible not to think of him.

It was several hours before she thought it best to return, when the restaurant’s parking lot began to fill with early diners and the sounds of the traffic all around began to grate on her ears. Steve’s bike was gone when she rounded the corner of the apartment, and she unlocked the door with steady breath.

Bucky was seated at the kitchen table still, and he closed the journal in front of him as she entered, rubbing briefly at his eyes.

“Rogers left already?” she asked.

He nodded, and she sat down at the table with him, hands still resting in the pockets of her jacket.

“…How did it go?”

She noticed something glint from the loose fist of his right hand, and catching her glance, he opened his fist obligingly. They were dog tags, still on their chain, and they looked newly polished though the lettering seemed worn.

“Steve snatched these from the museum,” Bucky explained. “My old ones. Said he thought I should have them.”

She smiled faintly. “Seems like a good birthday present.”

He snorted, smirking, but his face fell as he gazed down at the necklace. “…He told me Peggy passed away this morning, in her sleep,” he said quieter. He glanced up for a moment and saw her sympathetic but questioning look. “Steve’s girlfriend during the war.”

“Peggy Carter,” she said softly. No wonder Steve had seemed so solemn and distracted. “She founded SHIELD.”

“Yeah, he told me,” Bucky said, then smirked a little bitterly. “She was four years younger than I am.” The smirk faded again just as quickly as it had appeared. “…I didn’t know what to tell him.”

“There’s not much you could have said, really,” she muttered. Memories of conversations, the failed consolations of even her closest friends, passed through her head – people dressed in black, talking, but saying nothing at all. “…She lived a full life. Accomplished more than any of us ever will. …I’m sure just being able to tell you helped him.”

He didn’t respond to that.

“Did you ever meet Peggy?”

“I…” he started, and his brow furrowed. He rubbed at his temples. “Yes. I knew her…” But he didn’t seem privy to the conversation anymore, closing his eyes and leaning forward over the table.

“James?”

“I—” he said, then buried his hands in his hair and tilted his head down. “I need—I need a second.”

She took her jacket off and made to move closer to him, but a hand reached out and grabbed her left wrist, silently telling her to stay where she was. He didn’t make a sound, didn’t shake or seem to be in all that much pain, but his face was scrunched up in concentration and occasionally he shook his head back and forth to whatever was going on in his mind.

She hated the feeling of helplessness but she knew better than to say a word if he was grasping at the edges of a memory like she thought he probably was. Something had triggered him, maybe Peggy, maybe something Sera had said or done, and as she waited for him to come out of it she realized his dog tags were stilled wrapped around the hand that grasped her arm. His hair had long fallen in front of his face so that she could barely make out his expression.

“Серафима,” he muttered.

Her name.

“James?” she whispered, the sound of her own voice strange to her ears. Then she understood. He’d asked her about Peggy the same day. But surely it wasn’t that easy – was he remembering as much as she thought?

He groaned, his hand leaving her arm to grasp the other side of his head. The dog tags slipped from his hold and fell to the table loudly, making him jump. “Серафима…” he said again.

It took every bit of her willpower not to reach out to him. This was too much.

He started muttering to himself, long pauses in between, familiar words, and she knew she’d been right.

She recognized the one-sided conversation. She had filled in the other side of it herself four years ago.

* * *

 

_“Who is Peggy?”_

_Sera turned to him from where she’d been writing in this mission’s file. He hadn’t said a word to her as she’d come in this time, even after she’d told him “Good morning,” and she’d thought he was merely over-prepped, that perhaps they’d given him his mission before sending him to her this time. But his jaw had been clenched – eyes responsive but confused and somewhat… hurt? She wondered now if something more had gone wrong with the wipe than what she usually caused._

_“Peggy?” she asked quietly._

_He didn’t ask again, but his eyes stayed on her as if waiting._

_Could he have meant the Peggy she thought he did? This wasn’t the type of memory leak she’d expected today, not with the way she’d calibrated the machine. This wasn’t right. She put one hand in the pocket of her lab coat, fingering the frequency scrambler with a frown. If he said anything more they might need the privacy._

_“I don’t personally know a Peggy,” she said carefully. The guards were surely paying attention to the security feed – the Winter Soldier rarely said a word without being prompted first._

_His gaze fell from hers, and his own frown deepened. She knew the look. He_ did _personally know a Peggy._

_She turned back to the file, flipping through it with her left hand while her right still held the scrambler in her pocket. She’d used it when they brought him out two weeks ago – was it too soon?_

_“…Sarah,” he whispered. She fought the urge to answer him. “I know her. I…”_

_She pressed the button on the scrambler. Five minutes until they fixed the feed._

_She went to him immediately and sat at the stool right next to his examination chair. “Do you remember Peggy?” she asked quietly, quickly._

_“…No,” he said. “I don’t know why…”_

_“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re okay.”_

_His eyes seemed desperate. There was too much in his head and he wasn’t used to it. He needed something to ground him and even he understood that – somehow he remembered her telling him that several missions ago. “Sarah,” he said. “I… I’m not… That’s… that’s not your real name… is it?”_

_Her eyes widened. Four minutes left. “No,” she said, and then she said it with the right inflection. “It’s Sera. Sarah Brandt is my agent name.”_

_“…Tell me.”_

_“I shouldn’t…” she said. “We can’t do this…”_

_“Please.”_

_Her breath hitched at the emotion on his face – she’d never seen the Soldier so distressed outside of getting wiped – but then, she didn’t suppose this was the Soldier she was talking to. It was someone else entirely – someone she’d only had glimpses of, but of whose presence she found herself praying for._

_Three minutes left. She leaned closer and touched his hand. He barely seemed to register it. “You cannot repeat it, not when they can hear you…” she said quietly. “My name is Serafima. Serafima Vera Bardem.”_

_He said the name back to her slowly, his Russian breaking through. “Serafima… Vera… Bardem.”_

_She smiled weakly at him, counting down the seconds in her head while focusing on his expression as intently as she could. He seemed calmer._

_His eyes closed tightly. “…I don’t have a name, do I?”_

_“…You do,” she whispered, regretting the words even as she spoke them. Her throat felt choked. “You have a name.”_

“Скажи мне, пожалуйста,” _he said in Russian, and though she didn’t know a word of it she felt she knew what he was asking._ _Two minutes. “You can never repeat it,” she said. “You understand that.”_

_His eyes told her enough._

_“James,” she said. “Your file said your name is James.”_

_This was stupid of her. The most foolish thing she had done in an attempt to help him, but she had never seen so much of this man like this and yet he still showed her so little. It was stupid, but the look on his face, overcome with a sad sort of relief, gave her as much motivation as she’d ever need._

_“They’ll hear us soon, James,” she told him. “None of this happened – you have to believe that and show them nothing has changed, even if you know it did.”_

_He leaned his head back on the headrest. She stood to return to the file, but his hand was on her wrist._

_“Serafima,” he muttered. “…Thank you.”_

_She smiled at him, and she could feel the tears in her eyes at how horrible this whole situation had always been, but she blinked them away and turned back to the file when he let her go._

_“…They’ll make me forget.”_

_Less than a minute._

_“Don’t let them,” she whispered, turning back once more, and this was foolish too. “Remember.”_

_He met her eyes. There was still too much in his head, too many fragments, and she could see it all over his face. But then he closed his eyes and shut everything out – something else she’d told him to do, many missions ago, when the fragments of memories got to be too much._

_Something would give, she knew. She had to have taken too many liberties by now, had let too many memories slip through the cracks for him._

_But the next time they pulled him out of cryo and wiped him and sent him for her to check his health and readiness, she tried to call him Soldier and he corrected her. “James,” he whispered, and he didn’t seem to know where the name came from. He frowned, and then when she finished the check-up, at the point they had programmed him to stand and let her lead him to the Secretary, he told her, “Thank you, Serafima,” just as confused as before. His face straightened and he went on._

_He knew her every time. She began to ask him as quietly as possible if he remembered his name every time he came back to her, and he would tell her. Rinse and repeat._


	13. What Stays and What Fades Away

Bucky didn’t remember everything, but over the course of the evening some of his memories of Sera began to come back in pieces.

She stayed at the table with him through all the flashes, and when he would come out of it and need to write everything down. The third or fourth time he opened the journal back up, she got up to make them dinner, watching him out of her periphery. She could feel her muscles complaining as she stirred the pot from how tense she had been at the table with him for the last few hours, and she had to stretch as she finished up the meal. There was no telling how much longer he’d be working at this.

He ate one-handed and continued writing throughout dinner, a muted “Thank you” the only thing he’d said in the last hour. There were arrows snaking around the pages, she imagined to help him figure out the order of things, but most of what he wrote down were isolated little paragraphs like fragments of memories. The only thing she’d seen him write down in full had been the memory she’d been waiting for since she’d found him – when she’d told him both of their names.

Once the dishes were cleared away, it seemed the flashbacks had stopped. He sat reading through the journal, flipping back and forth between pages and occasionally jotting notes down. There were few pages he didn’t frown at, concentrating as much as he could to connect all the dots, but soon enough it seemed he’d hit a wall. He added a few question marks to wayward fragments before he closed the journal and ran both of his hands through his hair.

“How are you feeling?” she asked tentatively.

He met her eyes at last. It almost seemed like he was seeing her in a whole different light – where before his gaze had always seemed hesitant, wary, now it seemed considerably more direct and open. He didn’t answer her but she supposed he didn’t have to.

“Does it usually hit you all at once like that?” she asked instead.

His eyes moved over her face a moment longer before he answered. “…Sometimes,” he said. “It’s been worse.”

She nodded, and found herself having trouble deciphering the look on his face.

“You…” he said quieter. “You were sabotaging them. Whenever they wiped me…”

She nodded again.

He frowned slightly and then winced, as if from a headache. “…You’re the reason I remembered anything in there,” he muttered. “Why I remembered Steve in the first place.”

“Maybe so,” she said. “I never knew exactly what slipped through and what didn’t.” She crossed her arms and leaned forward on the table. “…It was you remembering Steve that tipped them off, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“I suppose it was more the fact that you’d never lapsed on a mission before,” she corrected herself. “But when you returned from that mission and debriefed with Pierce, Rumlow put the pieces together. I was one of the few agents who had any sort of access to that machine, and I think he’d already figured out I had a… well. A soft spot, I guess.”

His brow furrowed. “…So when he dragged you out of the room, before they…”

“Yes,” she said, and looked down at her arms. “That was when I went on the run. …Rumlow was going to kill me.” His face flashed across her mind, the feeling of the wall he pushed her up against, his arm blocking off her airways – the yelling following her through the building, the endless, endless running. She shook her head of the images.

“I remembered that, before,” Bucky muttered, bringing her gaze back to his. “I couldn’t figure out why it made me feel so upset. …I never could see your face in the memory, but I can see it now.”

She smiled slightly. “That’s a lot to remember for one evening.”

He leaned forward over the table, mirroring her, and she couldn’t remember when their chairs had moved so close. Perhaps she was imagining it. “Why did you do it?” he asked suddenly.

The muscles of his jaw tightened slightly as he watched her. She tried to relax the surprise on her face, taking in the details of his face to calm herself. “I had to do something,” she said after a moment.

“No,” he said, “I mean, why tell me my name? Why tell me yours?”

She smiled slightly then, but it faded quickly. “…I don’t know,” she said. “I just felt like I needed to. Like it was too important.” She rubbed her arm idly, then looked back down at the table. His eyes watched her softly and she could make out the blue of them even in her periphery.

“…I should have done it so much sooner,” she said quietly. “I was a coward. There’s so much more I could have done but never even attempted for fear of what they’d do to me. But seeing everything they put you through… Eventually I couldn’t sleep anymore knowing what you were going through, knowing what they made you do. Knowing I could have put an end to it.”

“You couldn’t have,” he said, and she was surprised enough at the response that she met his eyes once more. She wasn’t accustomed to the softness she still found there, or the openness in his speech. “You told me he was going to kill you, that that’s why you ran. They would have done so much worse to you.” He shook his head. “…Too many people have died because of me already, Serafima.”

A shy sort of guilt rose in the back of her throat but she could think of no appropriate response. She wanted to reassure him that it wouldn’t have been his fault in that situation, but the truth was that none of it was his fault. Before she could reply at last, he spoke again.

“I don’t even remember their faces,” he said quieter. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t recall the faces of his targets either – she remembered holding the files in her hands, but the pictures were blurred, their features nonexistent, their names erased just as Bucky’s had been.

“…If you had died then, I wouldn’t remember yours either.”

The guilt in her throat formed a knot. Perhaps he was right that it was better she were alive now than to have died to get him out sooner than he did, but it was hard to think past all the pain she’d seen wash over his features in the last seven years – harder still to think past the pain she seemed to be causing him now, to make him think he would have been the cause for another of HYDRA’s kills. She didn’t feel worth the pain.

“Well,” she muttered, pulling her hair over her shoulder. “…I’m here now.”

He didn’t respond to that, but some of the darkness that had passed over his face seemed to leave. She couldn’t read the expression on his face now but it reassured her, and calmed her as it so often did.

“You should try to sleep tonight,” she said, changing the subject with a half-smile.

His brow raised briefly and he glanced down at his journal. “It wasn’t as much of a problem when I was on my own,” he said. “But…”

Her mouth twisted. “Would it be better if I didn’t wake you up?” she asked hesitantly. “I just… I hate to let you go through the nightmare like that.”

“I’m used to it.” His gaze was level. “Sometimes I don’t dream at all. But if they’re bad enough, just you being in the room could be disastrous.”

She frowned slightly.

“…I woke up once with my fist through the wall,” he said, smirking bitterly. Once the smirk faded he sighed, and slid his journal back towards him.

“I’ll sleep tonight. But no matter what you hear, don’t open the door.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. It would likely be better for his recovery this way, anyways, for him to face his nightmares and his most difficult memories head-on, despite how distressing they may be. She could imagine that his worst memories – the things he’d done as the Winter Soldier – were the ones still missing, and the only way to retrieve traumatic memories like that was reconsolidation. Through sleep, though, was a much less controlled environment, and she found herself growing more anxious about this fact.

Bucky turned in early, walking slowly to his bedroom on the right side of the hallway and closing the door behind him.

Sera stayed up a while longer. The need to wind down was pressing, and she turned the TV on low volume for a little bit, still turned to the news. They were still reporting on the situation in Lagos, but the main stories were Peggy Carter’s death, and the rumored ratification of the Sokovia Accords at the UN meeting in three days – the details of which had not yet been released to the public. The reporters seemed just as divided as the Avengers were on whether the Accords were really the best thing for public safety, but without detailed information on what the document contained, neither side had a real argument.

It wasn’t long before the news station had her more frustrated than she needed to be, and after channel surfing a short while longer, she turned the set off and headed to bed herself. She glanced at Bucky’s door as she passed, pausing briefly to listen. The silence boded well, but she had a feeling it wouldn’t last long.

Sometimes she hated being right.

The screaming started three hours later. Sera hadn’t been able to sleep, and had settled for reading an old book she found in the closet, but she was standing from the bed the second she heard his voice. He wasn’t yelling anything in particular, just broken, open-voweled screams that only stopped long enough for them to start again. She silently thanked Sam and Steve in her head for how muffled the sound was, meaning their neighbors likely didn’t hear much, but _she_ did, and it was more painful than she could have anticipated.

It lasted for half an hour, broken up intermittently by muffled rustling and spoken phrases that sounded like barking orders, before it stopped with a single shout, Sera standing behind her closed door all the while and leaning her head against the frame with her eyes screwed shut. She was surprised his own screaming hadn’t woken him up far earlier, but when he finally woke, as she figured he must have, she nearly had to pry her fingers from her own arms where they’d been clenching in stress. She kept her head leaning on the door frame and listened for him.

After a few minutes, his door opened. Almost silently he padded the short distance to the bathroom, and then she heard the sink turn on.

The quiet was almost deafening, even with the water on, after so much time spent listening to his strangled voice. It was too much for her. She opened her door tentatively, stepping into the threshold and leaning back on the door frame with her arms over her chest, partly from worry but partly to hide the lack of bra underneath her cotton shirt.

He was in the bathroom a long time with the faucet running. Occasionally she’d hear a break in the stream, presumably from when he’d splash water on his face or something similar. She remembered nights like this herself, waking up from nightmares (though admittedly much less intense ones) and needing the cold water on her face to quell the aftershocks. But she had no idea if Bucky needed the same things she did after such events – namely, company. It wasn’t too much longer before she could find out.

The light underneath the bathroom door went out and he opened it quietly. When he stepped into the hallway, he didn’t seem surprised to see her waiting for him.

She wrapped her arms tighter around herself and tilted her head. “James,” she said quietly. “Are you alright?”

He nodded slightly, nearly wincing at his name, but stayed standing in the middle of the hallway. His eyes moved towards her open door, peering into her room, then over her form still clad in jeans but missing most of her accessories.

“Do you want to talk about it…?” She watched him with concern.

He turned his head away, seeming vaguely uncertain of himself. A frown colored his face and she watched him breathe deeply on a soft, shaky sigh. “It’s fine,” he said quietly, the hoarseness of his voice making her chest constrict painfully. “There’s just…”

“…A lot,” she finished for him.

He nodded.

They stood for another long moment and she watched all the faint movements of his face. His strong jaw clenched and unclenched, his eyes moving across the wall almost as if slowly reading something, and then he gave a slight shake of his head. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and there was a slight look of desperation to it that had her chest constricting even harder.

“It was something I hadn’t dreamed of before,” he said after another moment. “…I hadn’t remembered.”

“Might help to talk it through,” she said. “Lessen its power over you.”

He chuckled bitterly and the look of desperation she’d seen was gone. “Talk therapy won’t do me any good, doc,” he said, still smirking. It faltered only slightly. “This isn’t stuff you want in _your_ head, too.”

Her mouth twisted but she didn’t respond. If he was going to push her away, she had to let him.

Something he saw in her face made the smirk fall away, and he walked to his bedroom door, hesitating at the threshold. “…There was a woman,” he said, even quieter than before. “I couldn’t see her face. I never can. But she had your hair, same body type, leather jacket.”

“…One of your marks?” she whispered.

He didn’t respond to the question but she already knew the answer. She could only see his profile, but his jaw was hard set.

“I shot her in the chest,” he said. “Then I had to kill her family. When I returned, they tortured me for hesitating.”

He glanced back at her briefly, turning away at the look on her face.

“…They didn’t stop punishments like that when you were brought on,” he said, and she heard her own breathing hitch. “I don’t think they ever let on to you that they did it. I remember them telling you they were injuries from the mission… But I never got injured on missions, not that I remember. I was untouchable by everyone but them.”

Her hands were shaking on her arms.

Bucky’s face seemed to soften slightly but he didn’t look at her. She found herself grateful for that fact.

“Go back to bed, Sera.” And then he closed his door behind him.

She didn’t sleep that night.


End file.
